A few weeks ago, I accidentally sold my Tell Group Plc. stocks and lost the company advertising boost for my mining corp. Interestingly, though, I didn't notice any substantial drop in sales until several days after, right after I happened to increase my advertising budget fairly substantially (the opposite of what should happen with an ad budget increase). This made me curious if the passive benefit of the stock block doesn't trigger or get removed unless a change in advertising budget happens, which doesn't seem like it's working as intended (hence the bug report).
I did some basic testing over the course of a few weeks, and the findings seem to support this bug theory. I shared a graph below (that's a bit of a mess) to try to visualize it, and here is a description:
- I lost the TGP block benefit before 7/9, but didn't notice any substantial changes to sales until 7/16 when my ad budget increased by $1 million (I'm withholding exact numbers for privacy, but can share them privately).
- I increased my ad budget by another $2 million before 7/18, which had the intended effect of increasing sales. I also repurchased TGP to start the 7-day waiting period for the block to become active.
- The TGP block became active before 7/24, but I didn't notice any meaningful changes to revenue over the next several days.
- The smoking gun: before 7/27, I decreased my ad budget by a single dollar to see if it the tiniest change would trigger the effect of the stock block. Immediately, my revenue went WAY higher over the next 5 days.
I had no changes to my employee roster, their company positions, environment, or my pricing over the course of this experiment, and variations of employee efficiency were small and normal.
This whole ordeal wasn't a huge deal for me, but it could hypothetically be exploited by someone getting the block active, setting their budget to the place they want it, and then selling the block — keeping the block benefit indefinitely while freeing up the money to be used elsewhere.
Anyway, the TL;DR is this: The TGP stock block seems to only gain or lose its effect when a company's ad budget changes, and that doesn't appear to be its intended effect. Cheers!