The biggest story in tech no one’s talking about is Uber discovering they’d been defrauded out of $100M - or 2/3 of their ad spend.
And all bc Sleeping Giants kept bugging them to block their ads on Breitbart.
I was so surprised when Kevin Frisch, Uber’s ex-Head of Acquisition reached out to me one day on LinkedIn to tell me he found this epic fraud bc they actually DID block their Breitbart ads but somehow the ads were still slipping thru. 🧐
Uber was in deep shit in 2017 because Sleeping Giants was on their case for their Breitbart ads, followed by #DeleteUber.
Kevin said in an interview last year that we were a pain in their ass and he wished we’d get hit by a bus
Uber DID actually quietly block their Breitbart ads early on, but our followers kept seeing them and so we kept tweeting @ CEO Travis.
Travis was seeing our tweets and would ping Kevin saying “WTF. Have you not handled this yet?”
So Kevin - who is embarrassed bc he had instructed all vendors to block Breitbart (!!) - figures out which ones are letting the ads slip thru & pauses them. It’s ~10% of their total budget, $150M.
A significant % when they’ve already lost so many riders due to #DeleteUber.