I used to work with Hertz at a shady Tribeca ad agency. Some schmoozy account exec had convinced them that view based conversion credit was equal to click based credit. So a programmatically bought banner ad, even unseen, had equal weight to an active customer searching and buying.
Made my media buying strategy that much more difficult. To question the scheme was verboten, view=intent was sacrosanct.
Indexing flexible sampling makes no sense to me. I realize GoogleBot sees Quora differently than a human sees it, but they could easily make back end penalties. Your site loads too slowly? Organic search penalty. Broken rendering on mobile? Penalty. So why is human inaccessible content OK?
If content is blocked to me 70% of the time, shouldn’t there be a commensurate penalty? These publishers are shitting up Google results while harvesting free traffic to goose their new user acquisition numbers.
It’s the degradation of the organic Google product experience, I’ve always been baffled why they allow it.
I used to buy millions of dollars of ads for major brands including Verizon and NBC Universal. You’re right and wrong at the same time. If Clorox accidentally bought $1MM of ads on Pornhub would it hurt their bottom line? No. It might be help it with clever creative.
It’s all about Christmas bonuses or quarterly bonuses. High level executives are notoriously conservative and DO NOT rock the boat. All it takes is enough moralizing hypocrites seeing an ad in the wrong place or emailing the company or whipping up a Twitter cancellation and suddenly their career aspirations are at risk. And they are incredibly replaceable.
I don’t think it’s really relevant to the story, he was ethical but did schmooze prospects at dinners. Which is standard operating procedure for multi-million dollar database sales. The acquirer did the same.
He was incentivized to hustle harder, until incentives were stripped, out of spite.
I worked at a startup that was acquired by an unsexy behemoth. It was not covered in TechCrunch. We had a sales guy who easily cleared over $1MM in salary and bonuses, several times the CEO and founders, because he went above and beyond, closing $15MM of new business a year.
When the MBA consultants and salespeople from the acquirer found out, they couldn’t believe he made that much — all while they personally managed $2MM-$3MM books of business.
What do you think happened? He was slowly stripped of responsibilities and eventually forced out, for the crime of standing out as an exceptional performer.
Never approach marketing teams unless you’re Theranos sized courting Walgreens.
Corporate marketers hate risk. It’s a great way to lose your cushy job. What I have seen happen is that they embrace innovation, parade you around their offices and never close on a deal.
I saw this happen. The founder of BuyYourFriendADrink was the doyenne of Diageo’s hallways but after burning six months of runway no revenue producing contract was inked. Some corporate politicians simply exist to take meetings.
However, they benefitted greatly in the early ‘00s. If you had them in your Apple Music library, iTunes always put them at the top of your alphabetical music library, keeping them top of mind, ! comes before A. There might have a similar iTunes Store benefit too.