Did You Just Click on a Fake Hyundai Ad?
by Peter Kafka
Posted on January 20, 2009 at 7:26 AM PT
The Web is the future of advertising, but we’re not there yet. And getting there will be an interesting journey. For instance, I find it hard to believe that traditional media buyers have ever had to worry about impostors buying ad space using their client’s name before.
But that’s apparently what just happened to Hyundai and Initiative, the agency that handles its digital marketing campaigns.
Here’s the text of an email sent out last week with the subject line “Hyundai–Recent Campaign Scams–PLEASE BE AWARE,” from one Tiffany Nguyen, an assistant planner in Initiative’s Los Angeles office:
Dear Partners,
It has been brought to our attention by a couple of our partners that someone allegedly working for Hyundai, or working at other agencies, has contacted various sites requesting proposals, and have even run a short campaign. As you all know, Initiative is the Agency of Record and ALL digital requests should come from our team. These campaigns and RFPs were not approved by anyone working at Hyundai, Initiative or WMG.
Please be aware of anyone contacting you from an e-mail domain address of ‘Hyundai-inc.com’. If you do happen to receive a request, please notify us immediately.
Thank you!
The Initiative Hyundai Digital team”
Confused? Me too. I’ve asked reps from Initiative–owned by ad conglomerate Interpublic (IPG)–and Hyundai for details, but haven’t heard back. I checked with Tiffany Nguyen as well, but she told me that her “higher ups” were the ones who should be talking to me, and I have yet to hear from them either.
So, wise MediaMemo readers, you tell me: What’s the point in actually purchasing bogus ads for companies you don’t represent? I’ve got some ideas, but would love your input. (Ditto if you’ve got any idea about who the buyer is or where the bogus ads actually ran.) Sound off in comments below, or contact me at peter@allthingsd.com or via the blind tip box here.
In the meantime, I’ve been looking for iconic Hyundai ads and have come up empty. But YouTube tells me that his ad was banned in France.
Comments
There is a very good reason for it. It is a new biz model internet marketer uses now for “list selling”.
Buy ad, direct them to a site that ask people interested in the product to sign up, and sell the list to sale agents, sharing sale commission.
so long CPM < sale of list, then it does not matter.
For example, if i need to pay $1000 @ $1-CPM for 1M eyeball, which translate to 1,000 clickthru, which translate to 10 interested car buyers, which translate to $10,000 sale commission (1000 each assuming), then heck, I run a lot a lot of ads.
Posted by James Seng at January 20th, 2009 at 6:56 pmThanks, James. Definitely hearing from three different camps here, and you represent one of them. Here’s my question: How do you scale this? Each time you want to run a fake ad you need to approach a publisher and pretend to be the campaign’s rep, then create the fake ad and other tech issues, etc. Isn’t this awfully time-consuming given that you have to work in the margins to make it work?
Posted by Peter Kafka at January 20th, 2009 at 7:20 pmI saw on your blog that a pal of yours does this very thing. If you can, please ask him or her to contact me: I’ll keep them confidential but have many questions. Thx. pk
You can build a technical platform that runs “campaign”, put up ad, drive it to a site, and collect name list.
The trick here is to be able to filter traffic, doing very targeted ad. If you have a good sale commission of cars in NY, and house in SF, then you have to run separate campaign that run different kind of ads from different traffic. (I am over simplified here on the targeting ad. The real engine is far more complex)
You don’t need to pretend that much actually since most sites are happy to sell CPM so long ad mat is “decent”. An eyeball is an eyeball, whether it comes from Yahoo!, Youtube, or from XYZ porn site. My friend don’t even need to pretent because he has his own network of traffic sites.
Posted by James Seng at January 21st, 2009 at 8:17 am