How Uber Discovered That 80% of Its Ads Were Useless

And why online advertising may not work at all

When Kevin Frisch was at Uber, Travis Kalanick started shitting down the phone because Uber ads were appearing on Breitbart. Unable to find which ad network was ignoring their blacklist, Frisch started just shutting networks off one by one.

First, he shut off 10%. Oddly, there was no impact on rider acquisition. Then he shut off $100 million worth. Still nothing. Forget Breitbart. It now appeared that most of Uber’s digital ad spend was doing nothing at all.

We turned off two-thirds of our spend. We turned off $100 million of the annual spend out of $150 and basically saw no change in our number of rider app installs. What we saw is a lot of installs we thought came through paid channels suddenly came through organic. A big flip flop there, but the total number didn’t change. (Kevin Frisch, Marketing Today podcast, 14:45)

Uber eventually cut $120M of its $150M programmatic budget with no impact. The effect was so surprising that they dug deeper and found evidence of fraud. Fake apps, phantom clicks, the works. This is from the court documents:

Just before Uber suspended the entire Uber Campaign in March 2017, Uber was spending millions of dollars per week.