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The tl;dr version is this: Discover Card, which spends ~$15M/yr advertising with Amazon, wanted to give a $10 gift card to Kindle users that changed their defa

The tl;dr version is this: Discover Card, which spends ~$15M/yr advertising with Amazon, wanted to give a $10 gift card to Kindle users that changed their default Amazon 1-Click purchase settings to use a Discover card. Instead, Amazon gave the gift cards to everyone that used Discover for a 1-click digital purchase, the vast majority of whom already had Discover as their default 1-Click purchase card. Discover's $500K budget was predictably drained in rapid fashion, and they barely got any of the actions they had agreed to pay for. The author of this letter was encouraged to hide this fact, pitch it as an overwhelming success of the campaign, and to ask Discover to expand the budget. He was fired after complaining about being uncomfortable with participating in obvious fraud against their 2nd largest advertiser, and is now suing Amazon. The failures here occurred in every department. First, at a fundamental technical level, I don't understand how this could happen in the first place if it wasn't intentional. This was a simple CPA campaign. When someone changed their default card to Discover, they got a gift card. So it begins with their "ad execution team". Second, the moment the problem was discovered, they should have simply credited the campaign such that they were only charged for the actions they agreed and intended to pay for. Third, any employee actively involved in encouraging fraud, let alone fraud against their 2nd largest advertiser, should be fired. Their engineering, marketing, legal, and HR teams all failed miserably on this one. I don't envision myself ever having a need to run a CPA campaign through Amazon, but based on this I would stay away from them as much as possible. They had to have multiple internal discussions about whether or not they should commit a crime against a multi-million dollar advertiser. That's certainly enough to scare me away.

wehadfun 12y ago
thanks. So he didn't get caned for disrespecting the chain of command about some stupid latency issue
- MangoDiesel 12y ago
  No, that issue seemed to get cleared up successfully. He used that to foreshadow issues with his manager and general escalation communication.
- jxcole 12y ago
  That's right he didn't. The OP didn't quite do the TL;DR right, really the letter goes something like this: Part 1 (How I made my manager hate me): I insisted that we have better performance and everyone told me to f* off, so I went above my manager and now she hates me. (This is reasonable of her) Par 2 She asks me to commit a crime and I raise it with HR, etc.
abalone 12y ago
Is there any evidence Discover agreed to that? As far as I can see he is the only one claiming the sole purpose of the campaign was to convert 1-click settings. That is his editorializing. Everywhere else it's mentioned, e.g. in Amazon's response[1], the campaign was not tied to that goal specifically. He even notes this himself: "The promotion was structured in a way where anyone with a Kindle, who used their Discover card to buy a digital good (e.g. mp3 or movie), would get a $10 Amazon Gift Card." Amazon in its reply noted that they reviewed the progress of the campaign with the customer and Discover agreed to proceed with some minor adjustments and capped to the original budget. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-lawsuit-kivin-varghese-2014-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-lawsuit-kivin...
- downandout 12y ago
  I was just condensing what I read in his letter. It does appear though that their intention though was to incentivize people to change their 1-click settings. It wouldn't make much sense to give gift cards to people that were already doing what you wanted them to do. > Amazon in its reply noted that they reviewed the progress of the campaign with the customer and Discover agreed to proceed with some minor adjustments and capped to the original budget. He appears to be alleging that Discover made this decision based upon false or very creatively spun data. During a meeting about this, a Senior VP said: "Are we hiding something? This doesn't feel right". The reply was "In this case we're hiding that it doesn't perform well". Instead of showing them that their $500,000 got them ~100 additional purchases made with Discover cards (an absurd CPA of $5,000), someone suggested that "We can show indexed sales (on device + on site) vs. a control group that didn't see the ad". That sounds intentionally deceitful (not to mention quite evil). They tried to hide the ill effects of their colossal mistakes. > "The promotion was structured in a way where anyone with a Kindle, who used their Discover card to buy a digital good (e.g. mp3 or movie), would get a $10 Amazon Gift Card." That's how it worked in practice obviously, but solely based upon his letter, it appears that this was not Discover's intention. Some of the emails he quoted in his letter also appear to be pretty damning evidence that they knew that this was wrong, and essentially didn't care.
  - 12y ago

wehadfun 12y ago

thanks. So he didn't get caned for disrespecting the chain of command about some stupid latency issue

MangoDiesel 12y ago
No, that issue seemed to get cleared up successfully. He used that to foreshadow issues with his manager and general escalation communication.
jxcole 12y ago
That's right he didn't. The OP didn't quite do the TL;DR right, really the letter goes something like this: Part 1 (How I made my manager hate me): I insisted that we have better performance and everyone told me to f* off, so I went above my manager and now she hates me. (This is reasonable of her) Par 2 She asks me to commit a crime and I raise it with HR, etc.

abalone 12y ago

Is there any evidence Discover agreed to that? As far as I can see he is the only one claiming the sole purpose of the campaign was to convert 1-click settings. That is his editorializing. Everywhere else it's mentioned, e.g. in Amazon's response[1], the campaign was not tied to that goal specifically. He even notes this himself: "The promotion was structured in a way where anyone with a Kindle, who used their Discover card to buy a digital good (e.g. mp3 or movie), would get a $10 Amazon Gift Card." Amazon in its reply noted that they reviewed the progress of the campaign with the customer and Discover agreed to proceed with some minor adjustments and capped to the original budget. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-lawsuit-kivin-varghese-2014-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-lawsuit-kivin...

downandout 12y ago
I was just condensing what I read in his letter. It does appear though that their intention though was to incentivize people to change their 1-click settings. It wouldn't make much sense to give gift cards to people that were already doing what you wanted them to do. > Amazon in its reply noted that they reviewed the progress of the campaign with the customer and Discover agreed to proceed with some minor adjustments and capped to the original budget. He appears to be alleging that Discover made this decision based upon false or very creatively spun data. During a meeting about this, a Senior VP said: "Are we hiding something? This doesn't feel right". The reply was "In this case we're hiding that it doesn't perform well". Instead of showing them that their $500,000 got them ~100 additional purchases made with Discover cards (an absurd CPA of $5,000), someone suggested that "We can show indexed sales (on device + on site) vs. a control group that didn't see the ad". That sounds intentionally deceitful (not to mention quite evil). They tried to hide the ill effects of their colossal mistakes. > "The promotion was structured in a way where anyone with a Kindle, who used their Discover card to buy a digital good (e.g. mp3 or movie), would get a $10 Amazon Gift Card." That's how it worked in practice obviously, but solely based upon his letter, it appears that this was not Discover's intention. Some of the emails he quoted in his letter also appear to be pretty damning evidence that they knew that this was wrong, and essentially didn't care.
- 12y ago