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).

You think Uber's marketing people are extreme outliers compared to the typical large company?

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.