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Comment by giaour | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand the survivorship bias argument. If any company tried to follow in AirBnB’s footsteps and saw their revenue decline as ad spend went down, wouldn’t they widely publicize this fact? “Hey! AirBnB is wrong, and following their advice nearly destroyed my small business” would be a compelling read and get a lot of traction.

I find it hard to believe that such a demonstration of the value of marketing wouldn’t be immediately shouted from the rooftops by CMOs everywhere and find its way into marketing textbooks.

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> If any company tried to follow in AirBnB’s footsteps and saw their revenue decline as ad spend went down, wouldn’t they widely publicize this fact?

In the real world, a CMO who stopped advertising and suffered the predictable outcome would likely be removed from their job ASAP. Not boasting about shooting their company in the foot in a blog.

> I find it hard to believe that such a demonstration of the value of marketing wouldn’t be immediately shouted from the rooftops by CMOs everywhere and find its way into marketing textbooks.

I don't understand why you think these examples don't exist. It's marketing 101. Professional marketers (the real ones at big companies) are doing extensive measurements around their advertising value and customer acquisition costs.

Small businesses do it, too. It's really trivial stuff to do basic analytics on where your customers are coming from when they arrive at a website and it's not hard to see which ones are arriving because they clicked on ads and which of those translate into purchases.

I think this idea that all advertising people have no idea what they're doing and are unable to quantify their results is a weird HN bubble thing.

> It's really trivial stuff to do basic analytics on where your customers are coming from when they arrive at a website and it's not hard to see which ones are arriving because they clicked on ads and which of those translate into purchases.

No it is not.

If a customer came from brand bidding, you do not know if he would not have come to your website even without the campaign.

How do you calculate where a customer originated from, if he visited the site multiple times, sometimes through paid and sometimes through free channels?

You cannot blindly trust their claim that they are creating value - even advertisers from your own company are in on it.

I am speaking from my own experience working at analytics tools for a corporation, which has a monopoly. The product name is our brand. We are the only ones selling it. Every child knows it. Think public utility.

These people will still do brand bidding.

> I am speaking from my own experience working at analytics tools for a corporation, which has a monopoly. The product name is our brand. We are the only ones selling it. Every child knows it. Think public utility.

> These people will still do brand bidding.

Ooh this pisses me off so much. My IT consulting employee bids on their unique name. I guess the marketing department use it to fudge conversation rate of their ad spend. A scam.

Unless you are a dropshipper the value of Google traffic is way lower than appearant since people use Google as a address bar nowadays. And showing ads for people that already are considering to buy your product ... that is the worst kind of statistical causality poisoning.

Worth noting that in a lot of cases you’re forced to bid on your own brand searches to prevent competitors from claiming the top spot.

> I think this idea that all advertising people have no idea what they're doing and are unable to quantify their results is a weird HN bubble thing.

I’ve worked in marketing for a decade and my experience is that most of my colleagues are making things up as they go. Very few have any formal education in marketing, let alone have any interest in reading marketing textbooks or studies and even fewer still have any maths background.

I suspect things are different at larger and more prestigious companies, but the state of marketing for SME’s is pretty dire.

If advertising drives sales then you will see a decline really quickly if you cut spending. You’ll likely see this decline within hours. In order to restore sales the first thing you’ll do is restore spending.

You’re not going to wait to collect a bunch of data in order to be able to roll it up into meaningful research for a blog post because those lost sales are real money that you’re losing.

The thing is, it’s in AirBNBs interest to discredit advertising because they have a huge organic advantage over their competition. If I want to rent a holiday place somewhere, I’m going to search AirBNB first. Only if it doesn’t work out will I try a broader search, and be exposed to AirBNBs competitors.

Competitors won’t want to publicise the fact that ad spending is important because it gives them an advantage over those who believe AirBNBs argument.

This is interesting, maybe cutting all your ad spending is one of those things you can't really test? Because the consequences if you get it wrong are potentially devastating.

>If advertising drives sales then you will see a decline really quickly if you cut spending. You’ll likely see this decline within hours. In order to restore sales the first thing you’ll do is restore spending.

True for digital, but not for TV, podcast, and OOH. On those channels, it’s common to see a multi-week long tail of performance even after spend stops. Very annoying for testing.

I’ve always pictured branding like a flywheel. Advertising adds momentum. If you cut spending it will take a while before you see it slow down. And by the time you notice a real slow down it takes months to build it back up.

But this article is specifically addressing performance advertising where the advert is intended to directly influence sales through conversions.

Awareness advertising, like TV and billboards, is presumably coated separately.

(I admit I wasn’t clear about that in my post but it was my intent)

Of course people would be hesitant to widely publicize a failure of your strategy like that.

I agree. People publish post-mortems all the time. I don't think it's obvious good companies/organizations would be incentivized to keep a negative learning experience hidden.

Yes because every CMO knows getting a blog post to the top of HN is easily worth losing a few weeks/months worth of leads..

Let me go try with my business. If we crash and burn at least people on HN will read my blog post (maybe).

And their post would get 0 views and comments like isn't this obvious

10 years ago, I worked in mail-based marketing and we saw improvements when we did a better job of targeting our mail.

I've never written about it. But now I am.

AirBnB is totally wrong because of my 10 year old anecdote

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