Taking Credit Where Credit is NOT Deserved. Ahem.
I didn’t expect to wake up on tax day 2020 to news headlines about bidets, like “America has never embraced bidets. The toilet paper shortage could change that.” Apparently, it’s a thing, and has been written about extensively over the last few weeks, with stats. The Onion even predicted this, jokingly, weeks ago -- “Bidet Sales Skyrocket During Coronavirus Pandemic.”
But the bidets got me thinking about marketing attribution, and how ad tech companies have for years taken credit where credit was not due -- i.e. they claimed credit for driving the sale when they actually didn’t cause the sale. Let me walk you through the thought process. Who would have thought that a tiny sub-microscopic life form called coronavirus would drive sales of bidets after years of advertising and millions of dollars had not. And it wasn’t even a direct correlation. The Covid-19 virus drove a run on toilet paper -- also like no advertising had ever accomplished before. When everyone everywhere panic-bought toilet paper until shops ran out and couldn’t restock, the lack of toilet paper drove searches for and purchases of ..... you guessed it! Bidets!
So Covid-19 drove sales of bidets when advertising did not. The same happened years ago when the bird flu and H1N1 drove massive spikes in searches for “Purell” when their advertising did not. I am not an advertising apologist or detractor - advertising works, when done right, and when necessary. Purell could have stopped all or most of their advertising and most of the sales would have happened anyway.
But let’s just put it this way -- “cause and effect” is tricky, especially when it comes to advertising, even digital advertising (which has so much that can be measured). All too often, there was no cause, but the snake oil salesmen of ad tech gladly claim their tech caused the sale (so they could sell more snake oil). And advertisers don’t push back hard enough and call BS on that sh*t.
Let me give you some real life examples I have witnessed over the years.
Attribution Stealing, a.k.a. App Install Fraud
For years, Uber spent tens of millions of dollars on app-install marketing -- i.e. paying ad tech companies to help them get more riders and drivers to install the Uber app. But, when chief analytics dude, Kevin Frisch, looked more closely, it became clear that most of the paid installs would have happened anyway -- i.e. consumers installed the Uber app because they wanted to install it (“organic installs”), not because they saw an ad and clicked on it. When Uber turned off 80% of this digital spend, the app installs continued unabated. The difference was they were no longer marked as “paid installs” because they were actually “organic.” The fraud that occurred was “attribution stealing” where fraudsters claimed credit for the installs by creating fake clicks in the attribution system.
Furthermore, millions of installs which Uber paid for were not even on real devices used by humans. The installs were done on millions of fake mobile devices -- mobile emulators -- run in cloud datacenters. The boldest of the bad guys didn’t even go through the trouble of operating fake mobile devices. They just faked the excel spreadsheets that said how many ad impressions ran, how many clicks were gotten, and how many installs happened. None of it actually happened. They didn’t deserve the credit, and they stole the cost-per-install bounties through fraudulent means.
Location Fraud - Targeting and Attribution
Another recent shiny object in ad tech was geolocation based targeting and attribution. Some of the purveyors of such pangolin oil gladly looked the other way when faked locations, accurate to 10 decimal places, were passed in bid requests, so advertisers thought they were targeting someone walking by a Dunkin Donuts, right this second. Turns out 99 - 100% of the locations were outright faked, or simply stale -- the person was there 20 minutes ago, but are no longer in front of the store.
Other location companies claimed to help advertisers measure real “foot-fall” -- i.e. when someone walks into one of their stores. They did so by drawing polygons around each store location, so they could see when mobile devices “entered” the store. These location attribution companies got paid for “success” - the number of people who walked into the advertiser’s stores. But, what about those who would have walked in anyway, without seeing any ads? The location tech companies promised they would only count devices that were “exposed” to the advertisers’ ad. When the client agreed to this metric, the tech company promptly ran massive quantities of low-cost (often not seen) ads on mobile devices, so that whenever any of those deviceIDs entered a store location polygon, they would get credit for having “caused” the foot-fall.
Claiming Credit for Air
And then, there’s the cockroach oil peddler, TAG. The Trustworthy (not) Accountability (not) Group that was formed by the Association of National Advertisers, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and the 4As (agency trade group) claimed in 2017 a “monumental breakthrough” that reduced ad fraud by 83%. But, there was no cause and effect; TAG did not cause any reduction in ad fraud, they just claimed credit for doing so by using an invalid comparison. They took a rate of fraud (12%) from unfiltered ads and compared it to the rate of fraud (1%) in ads filtered for IVT (invalid traffic). The difference was 83% and TAG claimed they caused it. But anyone can buy impressions filtered for IVT at any time. TAG’s claim is like claiming credit for air, that anyone can get at any time for free.
Further, that so-called “breakthrough” was in reality a fake certification -- they certified vendors against fraud, for having completed paperwork and paid the TAG annual fee. This is even worse than if TAG didn’t exist in the first place because advertisers are led to believe that certified vendors have low to no fraud. This is not the case, when vendor after vendor that was certified by TAG, are now being exposed for having committed ad fraud all along. But of course TAG wouldn’t have known because they have 1) no tech, 2) no data, 3) no truth set, and 4) no expertise in looking at ad fraud. TAG is only claiming credit where credit is not deserved -- and causing more harm to the industry.
So what?
If you've been around as long as I have, you'll have seen many forms of snake-oil, pangolin-oil, and cockroach-oil sold by ad tech companies and trade associations, disguised as shiny objects that agency holding companies use to keep advertisers mesmerized so they continue spending - so the agencies and ad tech companies can keep making money. They claim credit for driving sales and outcomes for the advertiser when those sales would have happened anyway.
#marketers, wake up! Call BS on those various flavors of "oils" because those are no more than piles of fuming crap they are selling to you. Look at your own data. This is the best time to cut spend - the virus gave you the excuse. See if sales are affected in any way. And think hard about real "cause and effect" and whether any of those ad tech "oils" actually drove any incremental sales for you. If not, you won't need to go back to spending with them.
About Me: “I consult for advertisers and publishers who actually want to know the truth and who have the courage to do something when they find ad fraud. I am not a fraud detection tech company that relies on fraud to continue. I show my clients the supporting data so they can understand and verify for themselves what is fraud and what is not fraud. If they agree with my findings, they can take the necessary actions to eliminate the fraud while campaigns are still running, rather than post-mortem fraud reports and trying to get their money back.”
#FouAnalytics details here - https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/fouanalytics-alternative-google-analytics-fraud/
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Further reading: https://www.slideshare.net/augustinefou/presentations