Facebook Advertisers Angry About Major Glitch That Temporarily Spiked Prices (gizmodo.com) 45
Last weekend around 2 a.m. Sunday, "Facebook's advertising system went haywire," reports Gizmodo, "overcharging customers and wasting money on ads that didn't work."
Reports suggest Meta, the social network's parent company, charged some advertisers more than double what they agreed to pay, ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meta briefly stopped showing ads on part of its network with practically zero communication to its millions of customers.
The company confirmed the bug happened and promised to follow its "normal refund process," but shared very little about what went wrong.
A Meta spokesperson described it as "a technical issue that has now been resolved" (adding that the glitch also appeared to a lesser extent on Instagram).
But Alex Golick, the CEO of marketing agency Intensify told CNBC it was the worst Facebook glitch he'd seen in the decade he's worked in digital advertising — with one client burning through 90% of its ad budget by 9 a.m. And his entire customer base had similar problems: Golick said that all those advertisers had essentially just wasted most of their money for the day, spending roughly triple the amount they normally would to acquire a customer. "The results were horrendous," Golick told CNBC...
For brands that are already lowering ad costs to manage through a sluggish economy and a mobile ad market that no longer allows for targeting based on user data, Facebook's miscue is more than just an unfortunate blip. In low-margin industries, where every dollar counts, it can turn a profitable weekend into a big loser, while also raising further questions about the reliability of Facebook's ad systems...
Data analytics and marketing firm Varos provided data showing that, of the more than 3,000 ecommerce and direct-to-consumer companies that use its technology, the software bug caused a majority of them to experience a rise in cost per thousand impressions, or what those in the industry call CPMs. About 36% of companies were "very significantly impacted" by the bug, meaning their CPMs at least doubled, Varos said...
Varos CEO Yarden Shaked the glitch resulted in a "bidding war for nothing." Data about the glitch provided by the advertising technology firm Proxima on 108 companies also revealed that these firms spent their "entire day's budget in the first few hours of the day," the company said...
The company confirmed the bug happened and promised to follow its "normal refund process," but shared very little about what went wrong.
A Meta spokesperson described it as "a technical issue that has now been resolved" (adding that the glitch also appeared to a lesser extent on Instagram).
But Alex Golick, the CEO of marketing agency Intensify told CNBC it was the worst Facebook glitch he'd seen in the decade he's worked in digital advertising — with one client burning through 90% of its ad budget by 9 a.m. And his entire customer base had similar problems: Golick said that all those advertisers had essentially just wasted most of their money for the day, spending roughly triple the amount they normally would to acquire a customer. "The results were horrendous," Golick told CNBC...
For brands that are already lowering ad costs to manage through a sluggish economy and a mobile ad market that no longer allows for targeting based on user data, Facebook's miscue is more than just an unfortunate blip. In low-margin industries, where every dollar counts, it can turn a profitable weekend into a big loser, while also raising further questions about the reliability of Facebook's ad systems...
Data analytics and marketing firm Varos provided data showing that, of the more than 3,000 ecommerce and direct-to-consumer companies that use its technology, the software bug caused a majority of them to experience a rise in cost per thousand impressions, or what those in the industry call CPMs. About 36% of companies were "very significantly impacted" by the bug, meaning their CPMs at least doubled, Varos said...
Varos CEO Yarden Shaked the glitch resulted in a "bidding war for nothing." Data about the glitch provided by the advertising technology firm Proxima on 108 companies also revealed that these firms spent their "entire day's budget in the first few hours of the day," the company said...
From this morning's "Operations" meeting (Score:5, Insightful)
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And I wasn't even trying.
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These people don't live in the real world (Score:5, Insightful)
wasting money on ads that didn't work.
In the world I live in, almost no ads work on almost anybody. It's been such an unending tide of brainwashing nonsense for so many decades that advertisement is just background noise that people try their best ot avoid, filter out or simply ignore if all else fails.
And of course, there are people like me - and I know a lot - who have become so properly intolerant of advertisement that they make a mental note of companies that put out ads annoying enough to enter their consciousness and go out of their way to avoid giving them any money. On those people, advertisement has the exact opposite effect.
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Do you really think that (at least large) corporations, run by glorified accountants, do not put a monetary value on ads? They do, they can put value on your grandmother if they had to. And those ads are paying for them.
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Unless they do some A/B testing, i.e. stop running ads for a month to see if there's any difference at all, all they're doing is potentially throwing money into the incinerator.
All this dumb auto-targeting and auto-profiling is completely useless unless we as individual can correct their false targeting. You look at one wrong thing by mistake and suddenly you're classified as a pregnant mother or a smoker when in fact you're a male teenager who hates anything related to tobacco.
As an example, more than a ye
Re: These people don't live in the real world (Score:3)
When hunting for enganent bands the ads would show up not only on My device but on my girlfriends too.
For 6 months that I looked for the correct ring.and 4 months afterwards.
I can tell when she is clothes shopping as I get ads for dresses, blouses etc.
All this targeted advertising is target ipv4. They never drill down to the user they only go so far as the ip address and blanket every device in the sub block with the same ads.
We know ip does not equal users
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When hunting for enganent bands the ads would show up not only on My device but on my girlfriends too.
That would have annoyed the hell out of me.
Re:These people don't live in the real world (Score:5, Insightful)
Advertising agencies to a lot of A/B testing. You thinking that the only way to to A/B testing on ads is to stop advertisements tells me that you know nothing about how A/B testing works in real life.
As for you example of post purchase advertising, some of post-purchase advertising is misdirected. But some of it is about making you feel good about your purchase. Which feeds both returning as a customer and reduction of amount of returns.
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Uups, I see some of the pseudo-science here. So ads are not there to make me buy something, i
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>How does spamming me with something that I just bought and clearly do have to buy again in the near future is going to make me feel good about my purchase?
And in the previous post:
>Grip6 belt (bought their three-packs, best belts I have ever owned, even if that sounds like an ad) but I'm still being shown their ads on YouTube. Sure it's a great belt...
People with low self-awareness like you are the reason why marketing is the way it is. You assume that your opinions are your own. What you don't know
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What you have here are two quotes from two different people. I'm the one who bought the belts, and as I said I'll never buy their belts ever again (nor any other belt from any other brands, for that matter).
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Mea culpa. The point mostly stands though, because this sort of counter argument is actually very common among people who genuinely believe they're not impacted by advertising.
One of the really interesting things about studying human psychology and marketing as it relates to it is that even when you know what exact mechanisms are being deployed against you by the marketers, they retain most of their potency. There's no such thing as a human that hasn't been significantly influenced by marketing who lives in
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None at all. If they had been crap I would've returned them immediately, especially at the prices they asked for them. All their ads did was to make me aware of a different type of belt that I didn't even knew existed. And I think it's a great belt because of its features and strength, the ads have nothing to do with it. I still think it's extremely overpriced for what it is.
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>And I think it's a great belt because of its features and strength, the ads have nothing to do with it.
I will simply note that advertising people absolutely LOVE people like you.
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Why? Because I buy things based on facts that I can test myself instead of emotion?
There's at least two types of ads that I'm aware of:
- fact-based (things that people can verify for themselves)
- emotion-based (ads trying to convince you to buy their products based on anything but the product itself)
Those emotion-based ads don't work on me, in fact they just plain irritate me and makes me hate those brands.
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No, because you actually believe that there are people who can function fully facts-based, never employing intuitive thinking (often incorrectly identified as a part of emotional thinking by people who don't know about this aspect of human psychology).
And because you define fact and emotion based advertising in this silly way, rather than in the actually scientific way. That is where facts based ads (that are rare because they're highly inefficient) typically target abstract thinking, while emotion based ad
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But that doesn't explain how the online companies knew which brands you'd been looking at in the store on the High Street.
Or were you actually shopping online?
If you brought it once, obviously you're going to buy 372 more of them - one for everyone you've sat next to since potty trainin
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I think no corporation ever dares to stop advertising altogether because they're so fearful of falling behind on the marketplace - and possibly also because they probably can't do that without drawing the ire of the shareholders. But if they did dare, they'd discover advertisement either doesn't work, or work a lot more poorly than Google, Facebook promises it does.
In short, they keep paying for ads because they feel they have to, but they don't truly know what they get for their money exactly - and they'll
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I've always said the greatest accomplishment of the advertising industry is the sell job that they do on businesses where they convince them that advertising is so important.
But a huge part of that also has to do with executive ego. They feel very important seeing their own ads during the commercial breaks of major sporting events. Hence these ad spots can command a lot of money.
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Yes, companies put a monetary value on ads, but they don't really understand it and have no measurable relation between advertisement spending and revenue increase. A lot of it is business just goes through the superstitious motions (cargo cult), but without A/B testing, etc. Sometimes even when research reveals that advertising effectiveness may be higly misleading companies will resist changing.
Ads do work. But I don't think they work nearly as well as many hope.
https://freakonomics.com/podca... [freakonomics.com]
https:/ [freakonomics.com]
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I still think it's a great con job promoted by people who have not skills other than bullshitting people into believing them having one and calling themselves "advertisers" and "marketing gurus".
That they mostly swindle people out of their money that I don't mind being swindled out of their money, so I don't really object to it.
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Actually they do, but they do so via bogus metrics. Ads have stopped working a long time ago. At this time they are basically a long-term scam by the advertisers perpetrated against their customers.
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I've tried out a few places that have advertised on a local radio station that isn't owned by some big conglomerate. Since it's not broadcasting to any other place it really only has ads for local businesses. I probably could have
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People like to think "I ignore ads, 90% of them will never affect me" but really those were mostly irrelevant to begin with, combs for the bald.
You are correct that that ads are content to simply occupy brain space and future recognition, but they're also thirsty for targeted hits, which will indeed work on the "they don't affect me lalalala!" crowd. This is an ongoing field of study and massive amounts of money are being spent to hone it.
It can also be thrown off by digital hygiene. Avoiding ads entirely (
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Yes advertising works, but it also overrated. Note that the Most Interesting Man In The World ads were on television, thus the old school style of curated ads (negotiate with the broadcaster), and as well were interested. Most modern ads are not this way - they infest and slow down the smart phones, they steal your bandwidth and raise your prices, they're randomized and not curated. And they're ubiquitous - The Most Interesting Man became a meme without them spamming you. You'd see a television ad break
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People like you are a tiny minority of people who are disagreeable enough and conscientious enough to not only get a negative reaction to advertising, but also act on this impulse.
Most people are both agreeable enough and not conscientious enough to be in that position, which is why advertising works.
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whereas at this point most of the ads I see on Facebook are for books that I do in fact wind up enjoying. Most of the rest are articles that do look interesting. Few to none wind up actually annoying me. *shrug*
Delivery is the key (Score:2)
They are forgetting that for an ad to be effective, it needs to be relevant, to show people what they want and what they need. Loud obnoxious music and yammering on about nothing before getting to the actual 'meat' of the ad does not cut it, and the 'meat' usually takes no more than 5 seconds to deliver.
And forcing multiple ads on Youtube before the video does not work either and annoys users to no end. There is an easy way around it on mobile, but in order to protect Google from plugging this "hole", I won
Re:These people don't live in the real world (Score:4, Insightful)
In the world I live in, almost no ads work on almost anybody.
The best marketing is the kind where people think it doesn't work and think they aren't influenced by it. The likes of mega corporations know exactly what the ROI on advertising is. You're seeing adverts because they work. Maybe not on you (possibly on you even if you think it doesn't) but certainly on enough people to make it worthwhile.
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Indeed. That is why decades ago, advertising companies have come up with an entirely bogus metric: They do not measure anymore whether an ad benefits a customer, they only measure whether an ad or the brand name in there is remembered or, eve, nore bogus, whether customers know a brand name (not whether they buy anything there). Of course that is utter nonsense. It does not mean people are buying anything because of an ad and can well mean they stay away from the assholes that got on their nerves via the ad
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I think advertising works best for a reasonably receptive audience. If I'm a gamer, and I see an ad for a game in a genre that I particularly enjoy, in a location where it makes sense (like a gaming-focused website), I'd probably not consider that a bad thing. "Hey, I might enjoy playing that." A physical sign for a store is a form of ad that most don't generally mind so long as it's not too gaudy or obnoxious, because it's helpful when we want to locate a particular business. Want ads in papers worked
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It clearly does so ads work too.
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In the world I live in, almost no ads work on almost anybody. It's been such an unending tide of brainwashing nonsense for so many decades that advertisement is just background noise that people try their best ot avoid, filter out or simply ignore if all else fails.
For ads aren't targeted, I'd agree with you, but if they are they can be quite effective. I almost don't ever buy anything because I saw an ad for it, but if the ad is relevant to my interests, I might. Just yesterday I bought a product due to
attribution (Score:2)
> wasting money on ads that didn't work
Um, the vast majority of all ads didn't work and were a waste of money. The real issue is that there is some diurnal pattern in the internet use of the advertising targets; they spent the money at the wrong time of day. If extra was spent on ads during the peak of the diurnal pattern then no one would have noticed.
Cost and attribution are very opaque to the ad buyer, all they really know is how much was spent and how much was sold. The advertising network is going t
Im happy they are angry (Score:3)
Advertiser problems (Score:3)
all I have to say is (Score:1)
roflmao
Only last weekend (Score:2)
Wait, you think your ads work the rest of the time? Really?
Who on /. sees ads? (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand nontechies seeing ads. Well, a little bit, since even nontechnical folk could download Vivaldi or Brave.
What I don't understand is anyone on /. who sees ads. Aside from the aforementioned browsers you can use adblock or install Pihole.
Ubiquitous ads need to die. They are a plague. We need to move to services with free and paid tiers. Give me a service I appreciate and use, and I will (and do) pay for it. VPN, selected websites, etc..
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I understand nontechies seeing ads. Well, a little bit, since even nontechnical folk could download Vivaldi or Brave.
I can attest that Vivaldi works pretty well blocking ads out of the box. There will be some especially obnoxious sites where you still get ads (and manual blocking is really difficult), bit I find these few you can just mentally filter. And, of course, some sites like for example the WSJ will ask you do disable the ad-blockers. Instead I just do not read their stuff of find the articles someplace else, which is _worse_ for them than me not seeing the ads. They will eventually wake up to this, but not yet.
100% of FB ads are a waste on me (Score:2)