Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Depending on where you stand, the fraud issue is not a problem, or it is a small
one, or it is a very large one. For instance, there are the real-time exchanges.
They are paid by volume. They are basically saying, “Figuring out whether this
is a good opportunity or bad, or whether this is fraud or not, should not
really be my problem.” Now, you can argue, gee, if you are eBay, then it is your
problem and you should clean it up, but these real-time exchanges are paid
by bulk, so they do not necessarily have that incentive. Furthermore, they say,
“Look, I even have advertisers who want it because it looks great along certain
metrics. You say I should not sell it, but you know what? I have customers who
consider this absolutely what they want to have,” so it puts them in a very
tough position.
Now, the ad agencies say, “If I am going to tell my client that it is all fraud, guess
what happens? I will lose their business. That is not in my real interest either.
I am going to see if I can get around that problem in some way.”
Then a similar problem happens with measuring the ad effectiveness of the
creative. We have developed some internal tools where you can actually see
whether showing the ad had any effect on purchasing behavior. And we have
seen ad campaigns where the creative was very much click-oriented and we
demonstrated that it had zero impact on purchasing behavior. We offered
these tools as a service for a while, but the issue was that whenever the
answer was not positive, nobody wanted to know the answer. It is kind of bad
if you go back to a large advertiser and say, “Oh, by the way, your creatives do
not do anything.”
Gutierrez:
No one wants to hear that.
Perlich:
No one wants to hear that. That is what I mean by incentive issues.
So a large part of how things are presented, communicated, and represented
carry very different messages from very different angles, depending on what
you are reading, so you probably need a very broad depth to understand
the issues. There is not really one place to do that. A lot of the research-
oriented entities—Journal of Advertising Research and American Marketing
Association—that sit a lot more on the scientific side of it, are a good place to
start. I think they are in the process of catching up with where the reality has
gone. There has been so much change in the industry in the last five years that
there really has been a revolution. This means research has been catching up
as to establishing good standards of how to analyze this stuff. Nobody really
knows what to do with it.
Gutierrez:
What does a typical day look like for you?
Perlich:
A typical day for me is very much circumstantial to the niche I have
built for myself in here. Formally, after about two years of my being here, my
CMO, CEO, CTO, and I came to the formal understanding of how my position
