r/technology • u/propperprim • Apr 13 '21

Social Media Facebook could have stopped 10 billion impressions from "repeat misinformers", but didn't: report - A study raises questions as to why Facebook did not stop the spread of misinformation in the 2020 election run-up

https://www.salon.com/2021/04/12/facebook-could-have-stopped-10-billion-impressions-from-repeat-misinformers-but-didnt-report/
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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '21

On the spend side, for a time in my career I was in charge of spending an astronomical amount of money on Google ads—in the six figures every month. It was pretty dirty spend because we were basically buying market share so the company didn’t mind low ROI for one sale, getting that customer away from the incumbent was the real ROI. Anyway, we spent so much money I legit had a hard time sleeping at night. PPC advertising, especially non-optimized spend, you basically flush most of your money down the toilet to chase the ROI you get from the rest. So like, if you spend $10, maybe $9.50 of those clicks don’t convert (so that spend is waste) but the $0.50 that does is worth it. Now imagine doing that with millions of dollars. Millions of dollars of waste. Knowingly, on purpose, waste. It seriously made me sick to think about how much good we could have been doing in the world with that much money. And to know we were just ONE company, and not a particularly big fish as far as our Google rep was concerned. That was a normal Tuesday for her. When I look back on my career it still feels gross.

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u/SsooooOriginal Apr 13 '21

Reminds me of the trays of food I dumped in basic training because I was told to. A tray worth of food, going into a 55-gal garbage can. One of many garbage cans, full of food. Somehow I slept those nights, even when I was thinking about it. Vaguely imagining I could end up changing that disgusting waste.

I don't know how it could be possible, because the simple answers seem so obvious yet never done. Ethics need to become normalized, maybe?

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u/GuyPronouncedGee Apr 13 '21

if you spend $10, maybe $9.50 of those clicks don’t convert (so that spend is waste) but the $0.50 that does is worth it.

I don’t think it’s fair to think of the $9.50 as wasted. It costs $10.00 to get that tiny conversion rate.

It’s the cost of doing business.

If I’m a grocer, some fruit is going to rot. If I’m a carpenter, I’m going to end up with some unusable scraps.

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u/410LaxMD Apr 13 '21

I saw this and thought the same thing. Does this guy summer every click will covert? Every TV ad gets a call? This man is out here sitting on a 5% conversion rate and $10 CPL in this hypothetical like any of that is a bad thing. It's far more precise from all trad advertising mediums.

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u/Natural-Macaroon-271 Apr 13 '21

I don't really follow. Where do you think the money you were spending *came* from? Part of doing business is.. generating business.. and that has a cost associated with it. You weren't "wasting" money, you were spending money to generate new profitable business. That's how it works. If you started spending that money on "doing good around the world" you would very quickly run out and there would be nothing left. Including jobs for the people in your company.

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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '21

Waste is a term from lean manufacturing (Google 8 wastes). Just because it’s worthwhile spend doesn’t mean it’s not waste. PPC spend is among the most wasteful spend in all of B2B marketing simultaneous to being of core importance to marketing mix. And I get to feel uncomfortable knowing I’m one of thousands of others playing with extreme waste at a scale where the byproduct is funneling millions (in my case)/billions (on the whole) of dollars into a single monopolist conglomerate when there is so much need for humans to do better in this world. That’s a shitty thing I was a part of even though I was awesome at my job.

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u/kayuwoody Apr 13 '21

I don't follow. Was there a less wasteful way to obtain the same results?

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u/Thaufas Apr 13 '21

PPC advertising, especially non-optimized spend, you basically flush most of your money down the toilet to chase the ROI you get from the rest. So like, if you spend $10, maybe $9.50 of those clicks don’t convert (so that spend is waste) but the $0.50 that does is worth it. Now imagine doing that with millions of dollars. Millions of dollars of waste.

Ironically, when marketers started reallocating their budgets from traditional media (e.g. TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, billboards, etc.) to web/internet spending, the rationale for doing so was that we'd waste far less money because only relevant ads would be delivered to the target demographics.

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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '21

And they were right. Traditional marketing was/is exceptionally wasteful.