Lets Rant About Fraud

Despite appearances, this isn’t a Law Talking Guy post. While there may be words that are often used by Law Talking Guys, today I’m using them in their colloquial sense. Specifically and mostly the word “fraud.”.

By now, I assume at least one of you has seen the Wall Street Journal article about how the terrible auto-play ads with sound are the direct result of a contract with Farmers insurance. For those who haven’t here’s the gist: G/O made a million dollar deal with Farmers for an unreachable amount of impressions. When it became clear they were going to miss the goal, both parties mutually agreed to start running the obnoxious auto plays.

Auto playing video ads like these generate a huge amount of what is known as false impressions. Because no one actually interacts with the ad, and many people immediately close the page once this unexpected noise starts blaring. It also builds a lot of ill will towards both the site running the ad and the company advertising. Most people in advertising know this.

I think fraudulent numbers really hit their peak when video game companies started streaming matches on twitch and claiming everyone who ever saw them as a viewer in their ad packets. You’ve probably seen headlines saying things like “276 BILLION PEOPLE WATCHED THE LEAGUE OF CLANS WITH CHEESE CHAMPIONSHIP”. Most of these numbers are gained by embedding the stream in other websites (often owned by a certain wiki company) and pretending that the person reading an unrelated article is an actual viewer. Eventually people caught on and the practice faded, because it’s hard to sell something that everyone knows is fake.

The other big scam is Facebook. They have incredibly sophisticated targeting, and do an amazing job at putting ads in front of people who that advertisers want to market to. The one catch is that most people don’t actually see them or pay any attention to them.

One of my businesses markets to a very specific niche of customers who love our products, so we tried Facebook ads to reach more like them. We started quickly seeing conversions and sales directly attributed to Facebook, and initially were calling it a success. Except when we looked deeper we discovered that many of the sales Facebook was claiming were likely preexisting customers or people referred directly by said customers. At the end, I believe we identified one actual sale that could be tied to Facebook. Facebook recently got a hefty stern talking to for lying to the entire world media and convincing them to destroy themselves.

Which brings us back to G/O and Farmers. While most of the prior history of this problem stems from people trying to cheat advertisers, it seems very clear that everyone on both sides of this transaction was in on it. G/O and Farmers both knew that these ads weren’t actually reaching anyone. So why pay for them? I can only assume someone had a bloated marketing budget and a boss they could deceive about who was actually seeing what.

I need to know who thought they were getting 43 million legitimate interactions out of this. Was it the sales rep? The sales reps boss? Director of marketing? At what point up the chain did it switch from deceit to deceived? Or is it more likely that Deadspin was killed by a combination of terrible managers and Farmers having such a big marketing budget that the person who should have stopped this never bothered to check if a measly million dollars buy was legit?

And finally, as a capper, apparently G/O decided to ruin the user experience on this entire family of sites for ONE MILLION DOLLARS!!! over 12 months. So not only are they terrible at understanding their userbase, they’re terrible negotiators. I can’t think of them as anything other than Doctor Evil. And now that Farmers has pulled out of the deal, they’ve essentially nuked their purchase of GMG for approximately $84,000. And made me want to punch JK Simmons.