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The biggest indicator of a monopoly is when they can treat customers like garbage and keep doing business anyway. Google suspended the Ads account of our large
by dollar 5y ago
The biggest indicator of a monopoly is when they can treat customers like garbage and keep doing business anyway.
Google suspended the Ads account of our largest agency client ($20,000 per day) with no explanation other than a vague “policy violation”. They steadfastly refused to explain how the policy was violated or what we could do to come into compliance.
We contacted attorneys, wrote letters to Google executives, begged, pleaded. In the end our client fired us and they went back to their old agency.
Later we learned their old agency paid off a Google insider to flag our client’s account resulting in suspension.
Of course, we could never speak to a human being at Google and explain this. One day, the truth about Google Ads (and Facebook) will come out, which is that it is all 85% fraud anyway. Save your money.
Today, we no longer do business with Google Ads or Facebook. Given these companies make up 95% of digital ad spending, it’s fair to say we are no longer a digital ad agency. We’ve adapted to market around big tech, whether they like it or not.
With “partners” like Google and Facebook, who needs enemies?
- justinbaker84 5y agoHow do you market around big tech? The vast majority of time spent consuming media is through tech and traditional media just continues to decline every year.
- Crash0v3rid3 5y agoThese are quite the accusations being made here. Is there any evidence you can provide?
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y agoWait what? I can bribe a human at google to flip a switch and there are no checks and balances in place to discover a change made to a 20K a day account? How many google insiders can take bribes like this? Have they gotten rich from it? What’s the minimum spend to get official help then?
- new_stranger 5y agoConsidering there are over 150,000 people working at Google, I would assume the odds one of them would take a bribe to be pretty good. That said, it certainly doesn't prove this has ever happened.
- HWR_14 5y agoThere are 150,000 people at Google. But how many people can, on their own and without being noticed, flip that switch. And how much are they getting paid that they are willing to risk their job/career/a lawsuit to flip that switch? I assume their compensation from Google at that level is already pretty healthy, so it's not like they'd need that money for a necessity.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y agoIt sounds unreasonable. But then again look at how many people complain about being banned by Google or Facebook for no reason and without recourse. Maybe all it takes is to know a guy who can complain about the account in the right way that it automatically gets suspended and waiting for a human to take a look takes however many weeks. Maybe 20k a day is still small fry according to Google. That’s only 7million a year. Apparently Coke has a total marketing budget of 4 billion a year. Couple of the big guys on board and 20k a day is just a rounding error.
- Crash0v3rid3 5y agoI don't believe it. A single person likely can't flag a customer without a few checks and balances.
- rosndo 5y agoHaha.
- jessaustin 5y agoA single user, let alone a single employee, can certainly flag a variety of things. A user flag by itself seems unlikely to permaban a not-tiny customer, and maybe a single employee flag seems the same. However, employees are better positioned than the general public to understand the combination of small actions that will yield a big result when cranked through the mysterious nonlinear algorithm. The employee wouldn't have to understand the algorithm, because theoretically no one does. (Hello alibi!) She would just have to observe its judgments as part of her normal employment duties.
- nickfromseattle 5y agoThere is a reasonably well documented underground economy of bribing Instagram employees to verify accounts (blue checkboxes) [0] and steal sought after usernames.[1] Amazon employees have been convicted of bribery for taking $ to "leak information about the company’s search and ranking algorithms, as well as share confidential data on third-party sellers they competed with on the marketplace".[2] If this happens at Facebook and Amazon, I can imagine it happening at Google. [0] https://mashable.com/article/instagram-verification-paid-black-market-facebook https://mashable.com/article/instagram-verification-paid-bla... [1] I did not find any citable evidence on the first page of Google, but it's something I've heard from friends that are into influencer stuff. Supported by a quote from [1] "he decided to message someone with an interesting handle (a.k.a. username). That someone said they were able to take over that account because he worked at Instagram." [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/11/former-amazon-employee-sentenced-to-10-months-in-bribery-scheme.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/11/former-amazon-employee-sente...
- bruce511 5y agoHow long before some enterprising soul offers Bribary as a service? I can see it now - and intermediary that links willing briber with willing bribee in an anonymous way. Kinda like task rabbit for big tech... I'm just joking right?
- smcl 5y agoHow did you find out they took a bribe?
- jefftk 5y ago> their old agency paid off a Google insider to flag our client’s account resulting in suspension That's extremely serious. If you wanted to share details with me I can raise the issue internally; my email is in my profile. (Speaking only for myself)
- hackmiester 5y agoI applaud Googlers who try to put the "don't be evil" genie back in the bottle, but I wish you would point your energy toward a more-achievable goal.
- jefftk 5y agoRegardless of what you think of Google's business practices, paying off insiders is absolutely not something that any of us should accept.
- anm89 5y agoPaying off an insider to get something done that actually needed to be done seems a hell of a lot less problematic than capriciously destroying someones livelihood with no justification at all as the parent indicates that Google did to them. There's nothing wrong with taking gobs of money to work at a huge corporation but at least be honest that they are terrible.
- austinpena 5y agoYou don’t have an agency rep when you’re spending 7.3mil a year for a single client? Sounds off to me. I got one when spending ~1 mil/year
- justinbaker84 5y agoI manage 250K per month on Google Ads and all I get is the same lousy tech support from India that everybody else gets.
- austinpena 5y agoWeird. Lots of the recent reps that have reached out to me have been state side.
- justinbaker84 5y agoYeah those are all sales reps that just want to get you to waste your money on junk. When you actually have a problem and you need real customer support you get routed to India so you can listen to a low wage employee ignore the substance of your problem.
- austinpena 5y agoYeah, I’m under no illusion that they’re just there to get me to spend more. They’ve helped with disapprovals though.
- CyberDildonics 5y agoHow were they able to ignore attorneys?
- staticman2 5y agoAnybody can ignore letters from attorneys without consequence. (It might be prudent to seek legal advice, but your attorney might even tell you not to respond.) It's only if attorneys file lawsuits that you have to respond via filing court or arbitration documents.
- Razengan 5y agoThe entire advertisement ~~industry~~ racket is a case of an emperor with no clothes, a problem looking for a problem. Products should not be forced upon people at random times. All advertising should be replaced by opt-in directories with better indexing and filtering systems that let people search for what they want, when they want. “I want to see games like Dark Souls but in 2D with pixel art and a soundtrack like Blade Runner” Instead of mass-raping everyone’s privacy just to guess what people want, let people tell companies what they want. Instead of manipulating people with false impressions, products should stand out on their merits not on their marketing budgets. Honestly just banning all advertisement outright would snuff so many ills of society: coerced consumption, waste of resources, waste of time, uglification of public spaces, invasion of privacy, jobs whose sole purpose is to deceive, and other bullshit.
- george0812 5y agoI'd like to think that the need for advertising is just a bug in capitalism and eventually it'll go away.
- Razengan 5y agoIt’s a feature by now, that successive versions of the system are actually built around and upon. Like “rocket jumping” in FPS games: Moving ahead by harming yourself, hah
- LegitShady 5y agoadvertising took over capitalism, rather than going away it's driving.
- grog454 5y agoWhat system do you envision for bringing awareness of your product to new customers? Or do you just mean traditional advertisement and not marketing in general (ex: paid or incentivized product reviews). From the advertiser's perspective, if I can spend $x to acquire a user with an LTV (lifetime value) of $y, and $x < $y, why would I not? How would you prevent it? I like to think that I'm immune to advertising, and I suspect a lot of people here think that way too, but the bottom line is that it does work well enough on enough people to yield a positive ROI in many, many situations.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago"We contacted attorneys, wrote letters to Google executives, begged, pleaded." Seems like one is more likely to get a response by complaining on HN.
- afarviral 5y agoThis sounds fictional, but if not I hope you do find someone who can escalate that internally.
- cobbzilla 5y ago“The biggest indicator of a monopoly is when they can treat customers like garbage and keep doing business anyway.” Sure, but that’s not what’s happening here. You don’t pay your customers, you pay your vendors. Treating your vendors like crap is a widely accepted corporate practice.