If you read the email from Jill Losser (ad buyer at Discover) on page 10 you can see she is pretty pissed off about the problem and also uncertain on the details of what happened because Amazon managers have been holding back data on exactly where the discount monies went. When you cite the line about 'the promotion was structured in a way...' you're taking his description about how it operated in practice while ignoring his statement on how it was supposed to operate (laid out in the next two sentences). I agree that this is editorializing on his part and it would have been better, if possible, to include the text of Discover's ad buy request - but when you look at the email from the Discover ad buyer it's pretty clear that she's unhappy about the way the promotion has turned out.
The best interpretation you can put on this is that Discover may have failed to be sufficiently specific in the terms of its ad buy and that Amazon misinterpreted this lack of specificity to mean that Discover wanted to give $10 to any Amazon customer using a Discover card as their 1-click option, rather than incentive customers who were not doing so to change that behavior.
Mind, I'm not commenting on the overall merits of Varghese's letter but on the likelihood that he accurately represented Discover's expectation.
The problem she was pissed off about was lack of visibility into the performance data of the program, not its structure. There is no mention of a problem with how it is structured; in fact, there is a reference to another promotion, "free holiday shipping", which very conceivably would be structured the same way. Offer a promo to Discover card users, promote Discover card without going so far as to tie it exclusively to conversions.
The Amazon's subsequent email, cited by BI, notes that they resolved this visibility problem with Discover and they approved continuing the program within its original budget. That really goes against the notion that Discover had a different impression about how it was supposed to operate.
I disagree. In the first paragraph she says 'in the first two weeks we have over-delivered on the impressions allocated for the entire campaign'. Varghese argues that the issue was not one of excess impressions, but promotional monies being used up without any impressions being delivered at all, ie to Kindle e-reader users who already had Discover cards as a default and got a $10 rebate for just using their e-reader as they normally would, without ever having been served an ad in the first place.
There's explicit discussion of new vs existing defaulted Discover cards in her request for data, and a request for information on 'how [Discover] will be made good', which would not be meaningful if they did not consider any funds misallocated. In fact that's mentioned twice, the second time saying that they will still 'need to be made whole'. You don't ask to be made whole unless you've suffered some sort of economic loss, such as not getting what you thought you'd paid for.
Of course we can't draw conclusions on the basis of cherry-picked emails, but this one does clearly suggest that Discover felt itself to have been short-changed in some fashion besides a lack of analytics information.
there is a reference to another promotion, "free holiday shipping", which very conceivably would be structured the same way
Conceivably, but not necessarily, and even if it was structured the same way that doesn't mean Discover should have had any expectation about it. If was was in the habit of ordering apple pie from you and one day added an additional order for pumpkin pie, I would not be happy just to receive an additional apple pie - not because I had lost my taste for it, but because of the failure to fulfill my order for something different.
The Amazon's subsequent email, cited by BI, notes that they resolved this visibility problem with Discover and they approved continuing the program within its original budget.
That is itself a bone of contention - Varghese is suggesting Paul Kotas shares responsibility with Munira Rahemtulla for the whole situation and helped her obfuscate the issue. So without endorsing Vargheve's position, that email could be entirely consistent with it.
> There's explicit discussion of new vs existing defaulted Discover cards in her request for data... which would not be meaningful if theydid not consider any funds misallocated.
That's not really true. Cards run promotions like that all the time where the benefit is offered to all cardholders. One goal may be to drive adoption, but it also drives other goals like retention and brand value. It's false to assume that the only reason they'd be pissed about lack of data on campaign performance is that they had only the one specific campaign goal in mind.
Selectively editing my quote so as to exclude the primary point (about Discover's insistence on being made whole) forces me to doubt either your reading comprehension or your honesty. Whichever is to blame, I see no point to continuing this conversation.
Re: reading comprehension, being "made good" was specifically in reference to the distribution of Fire vs e-reader impressions -- which was in fact made good by subsequently restricting the campaign to Fire (see BI story). That's 100% consistent with Amazon's SVP statement on the matter.
There is absolutely nothing in there that states that by "made whole" Discover meant the campaign should solely target 1-click conversions. That is pure speculation and runs counter to all the email evidence.
The best interpretation you can put on this is that Discover may have failed to be sufficiently specific in the terms of its ad buy and that Amazon misinterpreted this lack of specificity to mean that Discover wanted to give $10 to any Amazon customer using a Discover card as their 1-click option, rather than incentive customers who were not doing so to change that behavior.
Mind, I'm not commenting on the overall merits of Varghese's letter but on the likelihood that he accurately represented Discover's expectation.