
Is It Safe To Assume 95%+ of Adtech Companies Are Full Of Shit? (2015) - AnbeSivam
https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/3qjhee/is_it_safe_to_assume_95_of_adtech_companies_are/
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Fiahil
I worked for this industry some time ago, and, to my knowledge, you would be
right to assume that "95%+ of Adtech Companies Are Full Of Shit".

Even in big Corporations like Criteo, someone will occasionally omit a portion
of samples during testing, tweak slightly output results, or flat out invent
numbers from the bottom of their heart in order to please clients and to give
them an illusion of something that works.

~~~
harryf
> invent numbers from the bottom of their heart in order to please clients and
> to give them an illusion of something that works.

Think (some) customers are part of the problem here - that they are happy to
accept this illusion because it makes their lives easier.

In your traditional bricks n' mortar company, it used to be that the marketing
manager could just hand over big chunks of budget to an agency and watch them
splash it on a few big campaigns (TV ads, print etc.) - easy work with the
added bonus of free lunches and other perks from the agency to keep their
client happy.

But online advertising is a different beast. The legitimate players in this
space, like Google and Facebook, require you to actively manage your campaigns
and provide all kinds of reporting to show exactly how you're performing. That
means work for the poor marketing manager who's a bit too used to long
lunches; there's effectively an audit trail for your CEO to see exactly what
their marketing budget is buying them, rather than some vague "brand
recognition" metrics which are easy to fuzz.

Spending the ad budget becomes like Brewster's Millions (
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9kMHiqS6Kg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9kMHiqS6Kg)
) so anyone who can step up with a way to blow large chunks of it quickly is
going to do well with these guys.

~~~
blahi
>In your traditional bricks n' mortar company, it used to be that the
marketing manager could just hand over big chunks of budget to an agency and
watch them splash it

This is the story that online marketing gurus love to tell but it's not the
case at all. It fits their narrative or they just don't know how it is
measured. The reality is that digital has a lot of data but it's not
actionable at all. People in digital like to think it is, but it just cannot
compare to downstream POS data, for example. And for a LARGE portion of the
business models, digital just could not provide the marketing-measurement feed
back loop for a long time. It is just now starting to come of age and has a
lot of catching up to do.

And there are plenty of lunches in digital too.

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blahi
Another interesting discussion [1] about the notorious VPAID that so many
people here were outraged about.

Turns out, HN is full of it too.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/4o0v2b/the_cancer_of...](https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/4o0v2b/the_cancer_of_the_advertising_world_that_nobody/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11900453](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11900453)

~~~
AnbeSivam
Does geocar's comment in this link -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10271348#10273922](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10271348#10273922)
, talks about the same thing.

I was earlier reading the above link, and also the links you posted, and was
wondering whether geocar was talking about VPAID ads.

Edit: corrected the link

~~~
david-given
What is VPAID? I've seen plenty of references, but never a definition.

~~~
AnbeSivam
This link explains it -
[https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/2tzbex/help_vast_vs_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/2tzbex/help_vast_vs_vpaid_confusion/)?

I am a beginner in the adtech field, and found the word ad-tag confusing. this
link explains about ad-tag [http://www.adopsinsider.com/ad-ops-basics/what-
are-ad-tags/](http://www.adopsinsider.com/ad-ops-basics/what-are-ad-tags/)

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mrgreenfur
As someone who is working on an attribution platform, I'm always amazed at how
few marketers use real performance measuring tools (like attribution
modeling).

Fraud should be irrelevant (well, a network problem) if you're measuring
against your actual returns. It's the immaturity of the industry (brands
especially) that allow fraud to be rampant and sometimes network-sponsored.

~~~
blahi
Ah, attribution. Another great idea that sounds sooo good, it must be true!

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dave_atx
Title needs a (2015). Old thread.

