When They Say This, They Really Mean That…
The online advertising version
- “The data we collect about you helps us improve the ads we show you” — “I’m being paid a lot of money to keep showing you those car and Vegas hotel retargeting ads, I hope forever!”
2. “Click here to opt out of interest-based ads” — “Please don’t click here. We’re not paying our lawyers enough for them to understand how ‘cookies’ and stuff work anyway.”
3. “If you delete your cookies, you may have to opt-out again” — “I know it sounds crazy but we use cookies to track whether you don’t want us to track you using cookies.”
4. “Our ad network only works with the highest quality publishers” — “We work with the highest quality websites where we can pay them more than what they get from Google Adsense. So basically, just websites where they don’t have any content except annoying photo slideshows.”
5. “Our team is 100% committed to your success” — “Our team is 100% commission-based.”
6. “We value your business” — “…appropriately, which is why for a measly 5% of your ad spending we can only afford to hire 24-year olds who’ll work for $40,000 and free booze from vendors.”
7. “We are running a rigorous RFP process to choose the right tech vendor for your account” — “We sent a big spreadsheet to the 10 vendors you suggested, and we hope they will fill it out before Friday.”
8. “If the cost-per-acquisition comes in below our goal, our budget is unlimited” — “Our goal is unreasonably low, so this website will need to get us a 2% clickthrough and 60% conversion rate, and then we’ll spend a LOT. But on second thought, if they did get those rates, then we’d get really suspicious and probably suspend the account until we were sure they weren’t screwing us. So it’s probably a max of $5k budget actually.”
9. “We pay net 30” — “We pay net 120. Unless we dispute it. Which is often.”
10. “This vendor was the best suited to your needs after we ran our stringent RFP process” — “We couldn’t tell the difference between any of them, but these guys got our whole team drunk at the baseball game last night.”
11. “We ran a test ad campaign on their traffic and they passed with flying colors” — “We spent $50 and got more than 10 clicks but not more than 1000, so it’s probably real traffic, we think.”
12. “Our dedicated customer support team is available 24/7” — “Our management team will answer your questions at night and on weekends because the millennials on our team are all hungover/passed out/they just quit.”
13. “Yes we can fulfill that 400-million video-stream insertion order” — “But let’s start on Tuesday since we’ll need an extra day to spin up some of the sketchier video partners on our list for this one.”
14. “We don’t arbitrage media” — “Except via our in-house ad network, which we’re not counting since it only works with other ad networks and we don’t bill separately so even we don’t really even know what’s going on.”
15. “Our (network/email list/partner program) is 100% opt-in” — “Pretty sure someone asked that question on the RFP, right?”
16. “It was a great ad tech event” — “The ratio was less than 80% dudes.”
