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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.
by 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.
- abalone 12y agoWell it's not only solely based upon his letter, it's solely based upon his editorialization. The email evidence we have shows that Discover was aware of how the promotion was set up. Kivin is relying on an appeal to logic to support this notion that there's no purpose outside of 1-click conversions, but if you think about it, there are other benefits. Plenty of cards run promotions and rewards that apply to current customers, even though the aim is ultimately to bring more people over. And that's exactly how it looks this one was set up.
- iaw 12y agoThey gave additional $10 gift cards on each purchase. So not only was this not based on conversion, it wasn't even based on uniques. Even if Discover okay'd the design of the ad campaign it seems pretty clear that everybody dropped the ball on ensuring it reached it's intended targets.
- FireBeyond 12y agoNot 'solely'. I think it's fairly unambiguous even from Kivin's superiors that they knew that the effect of the promotion was unexpected and unintended, and that there were "numerous concerns" from (as far as I could see) Amazon Marketing, Accounting, and Business Development about "what the hell happened, how did this go live with no or near no oversight from these business units - we need to tell the customer /what went wrong/" - their emphasis.
- robryan 12y agoIf that was the case though, that it was completely upfront, I don't see why discussing this with Discover would be such a big issue. I seems at very least Amazon were scared that Discover could insist that it has been implemented wrong if all the facts were laid out on the table.