This reminds me of a hotel that elected to advertise its own "Room Service Pizza" as a local commercial business. It went something like this...<p>A given guest checks in, unpacks, and finds themselves ready for dinner. They skim over the room service menu, considers Room Service Pizza, and then dials a nearby pizza chain for delivery. Reviews for Room Service Pizza were not good. At the time, "Dominoes Is Cardboard" among similar chain-pizza love was going on so it wasn't looking up for Room Service Pizza even though it was right there on site and arguably not that bad as the story goes.<p>The hotel tried "everything" but it would never work; recipes, surveys, fresh ingredients... "One Chain Pizza, Please" was always the result.<p>One day someone desperate and with authority had an idea. They had changed "everything else" by this point, so let's go "marketing". This person drums up a separate phone number, business name, menu, logo, uniforms, the whole bit for Room Service Pizza. Drops the flier menu into the "local restaurants" courtesy spread in their rooms. It's not "Room Service Pizza" anymore, it's "Tony's Tower Pizza" or whatever.<p>Orders pick up. Reviews go up. Deliveries for Chain Pizza start to drop a bit on a noticeable level. Every time the special phone line for "Room Service Pizza", aka "Tony's Tower Pizza", rang up they knew something had finally broke free for themselves.<p>... So, I guess my point is that this isn't the first time pizza and playing masquerade have come together for a business. Here, a hotel uses ads and "rebranding" to sell their own pizza vs Google using fake pizza to sell more ads. If pizza were a coin, these might be opposite sides of it.
1. It's hard to understand these conclusions without knowing what they used to measure the effectiveness. Clicks? Skips?<p>2. From the headline, I assumed that they used a fake brand to track the number of searches for it later. Perhaps to see how paid ads could influence organic search. It seems like that would have been a more interesting result.
This is like the age-old "hack" of creating a landing page for a B2B startup that doesn't exist, to gauge demand and build a marketing list.
I do wonder if some of the outcomes were dictated by people wondering about what this new brand was. It would be different if they were serving small populations, but they served it 20 Million times. I guess that is a good case study for small brands, but do the results stay the same when people recognize the brand?
Is this even legal, given false advertising guidelines? They have provided an advertisement for products by a company that doesn't exist. I don't know the legal details, but I am questioning whether this is actually permitted in the U.S. if you go by the letter of the law.
This concept is very creepy. This particular pizza example reported is not but who knows if they come clean on ALL their experiments. They have a lot of power in their hands and now they are running experiments on people without them even knowing? This can get out of hand just like ads were used to push certain narratives during elections all over the world in all platforms and just like Facebook was playing with people's emotions with different posts shown [0]. No regulation, no ethic panel, no external audit, no transparency and they still show it off innocently.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-emotion-study-breached-ethical-guidelines-researchers-say" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...</a>
This is not without precedent in the ad industry, although the level of subtlety varies a lot.<p>Billboards are a notable example, because the medium is in-house and there's almost always latent inventory. Adams Outdoor once advertised the fictitious, toilet humor brand 'Outhouse Springs', then years later the seemingly personality-enhancing wonder drug 'Reachemol'. Lamar's Milwaukee division advertised a cat doctor with a preference for chocolate who healed 'boo-boos with nom-noms'.<p>This is essentially a big A/B test, and unlike billboards, they can collect fine-grained data on how people interact with the ad.
Damn, I'm jonesing for a Celeste four-cheese microwave pizza really bad rn. Where might a lowly member of the public borrow magical 1970's microwave technology in the Mountain View area?<p>PS: Anyone have one of those huge Radarange RR-9 microwaves with that (capacitive?) touch-panel in the late 70's or early 80's? Yup, I'm ooooold.