Read the podcast transcript. An economist proposed turning off print ads in one market to find out if they mattered, and the head of marketing said he’d rather not know.
"Chief marketing officer of Unilever" isn't the guy running experiments, he's the guy that hires ad agencies and auditors that in turn have teams of data scientists running various experiments for Unilever.
I guess you could propose a conspiracy theory that all these people are conspiring to put together fake reports and data sets, but that sounds extremely unrealistic - ad agencies are essentially money-counting businesses like banks, and they take data security very seriously. (Because usually they'd be audited at every step.)
In short, smart people have already thought about these issues, and there isn't any inherent pro-advertising bias in industry, rather the opposite.
Only because the head of marketing realized it would expose his past misjudgments - not because he didn't realize it would actually be a good thing for the company. You'll see this type of behavior in every department - people trying to cover up their mistakes.
Wait, so their marketers are unwilling to do anything that would reveal ad ineffectiveness, and you consider that an argument in favor of the claim that ads are effective (the topic at this point in the thread)? Like, you take that as a signal that marketers would converge on effective ads?
My point is that we have to differentiate between bad employees and the overall effectiveness of ads.
The latter is all about incrementality. When you adjust for it, you get the true effectiveness of ads. In some instances, the incrementality will be significant, in others it won't. It looks like that in Uber's case, the incrementality was low. Btw, if you're not familiar with this term, please look it up - there's a ton of literature on it: https://www.adroll.com/blog/marketing-analytics/beginners-gu...
Which brings me to the point about bad employees - marketers who are not adjusting their performance measurement based on incrementality should be fired (and it certainly looks like this was not being done at Uber at that time).
I interviewed at Uber for a marketing position back when they were small, and decided not to take the job (huge mistake). At least back then, the people I met were super smart (a lot of them were ex Facebook, again back when those teams were super good). I never met Kevin Frisch and don't know if anything he said was taken out of context, but the first impression is not good. Also it's a bit strange for a well-respected Uber guy to go to Intuit - it's not a common career path.
