
Google created a fake pizza brand to test creative strategies for YouTube ads - CrazedGeek
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/20/google-doctor-fork/
======
drdeadringer
This reminds me of a hotel that elected to advertise its own "Room Service
Pizza" as a local commercial business. It went something like this...

A given guest checks in, unpacks, and finds themselves ready for dinner. They
skim over the room service menu, considers Room Service Pizza, and then dials
a nearby pizza chain for delivery. Reviews for Room Service Pizza were not
good. At the time, "Dominoes Is Cardboard" among similar chain-pizza love was
going on so it wasn't looking up for Room Service Pizza even though it was
right there on site and arguably not that bad as the story goes.

The hotel tried "everything" but it would never work; recipes, surveys, fresh
ingredients... "One Chain Pizza, Please" was always the result.

One day someone desperate and with authority had an idea. They had changed
"everything else" by this point, so let's go "marketing". This person drums up
a separate phone number, business name, menu, logo, uniforms, the whole bit
for Room Service Pizza. Drops the flier menu into the "local restaurants"
courtesy spread in their rooms. It's not "Room Service Pizza" anymore, it's
"Tony's Tower Pizza" or whatever.

Orders pick up. Reviews go up. Deliveries for Chain Pizza start to drop a bit
on a noticeable level. Every time the special phone line for "Room Service
Pizza", aka "Tony's Tower Pizza", rang up they knew something had finally
broke free for themselves.

... So, I guess my point is that this isn't the first time pizza and playing
masquerade have come together for a business. Here, a hotel uses ads and
"rebranding" to sell their own pizza vs Google using fake pizza to sell more
ads. If pizza were a coin, these might be opposite sides of it.

~~~
dawnerd
Universal Orlando has their own in house pizza that’s totally branded
differently and they even throw flyers under the hotel room doors to make it
look like a local chain. Thing is, it’s actually pretty decent pizza and the
price isn’t too bad either. In their case I think most people have caught on
to theme park resort pizza being awful so branding was essential.

~~~
nerdponx
_it’s actually pretty decent pizza and the price isn’t too bad either._

Most room service pizza is. Suggestion is a powerful force.

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legitster
1\. It's hard to understand these conclusions without knowing what they used
to measure the effectiveness. Clicks? Skips?

2\. From the headline, I assumed that they used a fake brand to track the
number of searches for it later. Perhaps to see how paid ads could influence
organic search. It seems like that would have been a more interesting result.

~~~
ectospheno
I read the article and I also can't figure out how they measured what they
claim to have measured. The results seem made up in much the same way other
advertising metrics and results seem made up.

~~~
alentodorov
Whenever I used to run Youtube ads ($100k campaigns) the account manager at
Google Ads informed us about an automated option of neasuring assisted and
unassisted recall. People whom seen the ads were presented with one question
surveys on Youtube. It was pretty interesting as you could see what would be a
good reach and frequency for your ads.

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fipple
This is like the age-old "hack" of creating a landing page for a B2B startup
that doesn't exist, to gauge demand and build a marketing list.

~~~
rhizome
That's the canonical definition of an MVP.

~~~
cookingrobot
An MVP has just enough features to satisfy early customers. If all you've
built is a landing page to gauge interest, that's useful for validating the
idea, but that's not a product.

~~~
lucasmullens
The iconic Dropbox MVP was just a video, so I'd argue an MVP can often refer
to something like a simple landing page.

~~~
mygo
I mean... just because someone can call a video an MVP doesn’t mean it was an
MVP.

An MVP is a functioning product/service. It’s something that provides enough
utility / functionality that the user can actually use. Unless dropbox was a
media company demoing a new film, the video was not an MVP. It was a marketing
campaign.

------
partiallypro
I do wonder if some of the outcomes were dictated by people wondering about
what this new brand was. It would be different if they were serving small
populations, but they served it 20 Million times. I guess that is a good case
study for small brands, but do the results stay the same when people recognize
the brand?

~~~
sushid
It seems like this might be the precursor to doing a real test (probably
small/regional) with a real brand. If the response was extremely negative I'd
think that they'd shelve it altogether.

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marzell
Is this even legal, given false advertising guidelines? They have provided an
advertisement for products by a company that doesn't exist. I don't know the
legal details, but I am questioning whether this is actually permitted in the
U.S. if you go by the letter of the law.

~~~
oh_sigh
I am not an expert in this area, but none of the ads I watched seem to
actually advertise anything. There is basically just a picture of a pizza and
a saying like "The tangy sweetness of fresh mozzarella"

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFfnLmpHEyLYLqHdyOmVE...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFfnLmpHEyLYLqHdyOmVElmy_5isisklx)

~~~
daeken
For this to be false advertising, there would need to be an offer that's
extended to customers. For instance, "$10 large pizza" would be an offer: give
us $10 and we give you a large pizza. If they failed to follow through on that
deal (by, say, not accepting money and not giving pizzas) then that would be
false advertising. There's no such offer in these ads, or anything that could
even be remotely construed as an offer.

This is not an advertisement for chocolate cake:
[https://tastesbetterfromscratch.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/...](https://tastesbetterfromscratch.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/12/Dark-Chocolate-Cake-5.jpg)

------
lalos
This concept is very creepy. This particular pizza example reported is not but
who knows if they come clean on ALL their experiments. They have a lot of
power in their hands and now they are running experiments on people without
them even knowing? This can get out of hand just like ads were used to push
certain narratives during elections all over the world in all platforms and
just like Facebook was playing with people's emotions with different posts
shown [0]. No regulation, no ethic panel, no external audit, no transparency
and they still show it off innocently.

[0]
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-
emotion-study-breached-ethical-guidelines-researchers-say)

~~~
ThomPete
I am trying to understand the moral/ethical issue here. Care to elaborate?
There might be something I am missing here cause I just don't see it. It's a
genuine question.

~~~
anonymfus
These ads were lying.

~~~
kowdermeister
Aren't all ads lying?

~~~
anyfoo
I keep being baffled at how transgressions tend to get handwaved away with
"everybody does it" by some commenters on Hacker News.

First, there are plenty of locations where advertising is heavily regulated.
Second, even in locations where that is not true, "everybody does it" does not
justify anything. Every surgeon used to perform their job without washing
their hands, and yet we got rid of that behavior.

~~~
kowdermeister
> "everybody does it" does not justify anything

Indeed, it doesn't, I just found the commenter being way too captain obvious
:)

------
gukov
If you're not paying, you're the prod... test subject.

------
sarcasmic
This is not without precedent in the ad industry, although the level of
subtlety varies a lot.

Billboards are a notable example, because the medium is in-house and there's
almost always latent inventory. Adams Outdoor once advertised the fictitious,
toilet humor brand 'Outhouse Springs', then years later the seemingly
personality-enhancing wonder drug 'Reachemol'. Lamar's Milwaukee division
advertised a cat doctor with a preference for chocolate who healed 'boo-boos
with nom-noms'.

This is essentially a big A/B test, and unlike billboards, they can collect
fine-grained data on how people interact with the ad.

------
modells
Damn, I'm jonesing for a Celeste four-cheese microwave pizza really bad rn.
Where might a lowly member of the public borrow magical 1970's microwave
technology in the Mountain View area?

PS: Anyone have one of those huge Radarange RR-9 microwaves with that
(capacitive?) touch-panel in the late 70's or early 80's? Yup, I'm ooooold.

------
wiradikusuma
The 1st and 2nd conclusions seem to contradict each other: one said put
everything together while the other one said no?

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jacquesm
There's a Dutch IT company (Topicus) that has an _actual_ Pizza brand, and
they brew their own beer too!

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trumped
looks like engineers or robots decided on the store name... "Doctor Fork"? for
a pizza restaurant?

~~~
ronilan
They ran an experiment.

Users reported that eating pizza with a fork was much preferred to eating it
with chopsticks.

The Chinese version may differ though. They’ll test this later if the party
allows.

~~~
thefounder
Who eats pizza with chopsticks?

~~~
bausshf
The same people who eats pizza with banana

~~~
trumped
Did someone say Hawaiian pizza? (or is that with pineapple...)

~~~
bausshf
Hawaiian pizza is with pineapple.

This is a Swedish abomination.

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in_hindsight
Is it the pizza they called during voice assistant demo? ;)

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tabtab
"Totally _fork news_ , believe me!"

------
amelius
Tl;dr: Google did a bunch of experiments to see how best to manipulate people.
They used a fake pizza brand "Doctor Fork" for this purpose.

