Friday, Feb 4, 2022 • 55min
Defunding the Insurrectionists
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As we’ve discussed on the show, online advertisements are the shifting, unstable sand on which the contemporary internet is built. And one of the many, many ways in which the online ad ecosystem is confusing and opaque involves how advertisers can find their ads popping up alongside content they’d rather not be associated with—and, all too often, not having any idea how that happened. This week on Arbiters of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke to Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin of the Check My Ads Institute https://checkmyads.org/ Their goal is to serve as a watchdog for the ad industry, and they’ve just started a campaign https://checkmyads.org/branded/j6-defund-the-insurrectionists/ to let companies know—and call them out—when their ads are showing up next to content published by far-right figures like Steve Bannon who supported the Jan. 6 insurrection. So what is it about the ads industry that makes things so opaque, even for the companies paying to have their ads appear online? What techniques do Claire and Nandini use to trace ad distribution? And how do advertisers usually respond when Check My Ads alerts them that they’re funding “brand unsafe” content?
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Nandini Jammi
Claire Atkin
Evelyn Douek
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Quinta Jurecic
00:00
The following podcast contains advertisements if you prefer a podcast without advertisements, you can sign up for our ad-free version at patreon.com/lawfare. That's patreon.com/lawfare. You'll get rid of the ads and will be very grateful.
Share
Nandini Jammi
00:24
This is there in writing it is the ad exchanges legal agreement with the advertiser and we're asking them to enforce it. So what we're doing is we're empowering advertisers to go to their ad exchanges and ask them questions and ask them to cut these people off on behalf of their customers and on behalf of their values.
Share
Quinta Jurecic
00:42
I'm Quinta Jurecic and this is the Law Fair Podcast, January 27th, 2022. Today we're bringing you another episode of Arbiters Of Truth, our series on the online information ecosystem. And once again, we're talking about online ads as we've discussed on the show. Online advertisements are the shifting, unstable sand on which the contemporary internet is built.
Share
01:09
And one of the many, many ways in which the online ad ecosystem is confusing and opaque involves how advertisers can find their ads popping up alongside content they'd rather not be associated with, and all too often not having any idea how that happened.
Share
01:27
This week, Evelyn Douek and I spoke to
Nandini Jammi
and Claire Atkin of the Check My Ads
institute.Share
01:35
Their goal is to serve as a watchdog for the ad industry and they've just started a campaign to let companies know and call them out when their ads are showing up next to content published by far-right figures like
Steve Bannon
who supported the January 6th Insurrection
.Share
01:52
So what is it about the ad industry that makes things so opaque, even for the company's paying to have their ads appear online? What techniques do Claire and
Nandini
used to trace ad distribution? And how do advertisers usually respond when Check My Ads
, lets them know their funding. What's called "brand unsafe" content?Share
02:13
It's the Law Fair Podcast, January 27th, Defunding the Insurrectionists.
Share
02:21
We wanted to start broadly. What's your goal at
Check My Ads
and how did you come to be interested in doing this kind of work?Share
Claire Atkin
02:30
So our goal at
Check My Ads
is to be the Ad Tech Watchdog. We realized that there is no one out there enforcing this $400 billion dollar industry and the standards that they have set for themselves. And our first mission is to dismantle the disinformation economy. So we published stories about when ad exchanges are working directly with publishers of hate speech and disinformation.Share
Evelyn Douek
02:58
Great. And so to keep sort of laying the groundwork for our discussion, I think at the center of a lot of what you're doing and frankly everything to do with the internet is the concept of "
brand safety
".Share
03:08
Regular listeners are probably really bored of hearing me say that
brand safety
is the biggest driver of the shape about online ecosystem that we never talk about. So let's talk about it a little bit. How would you define brand safety
and how is it relevant to what you're doing and Check My Ads
?Share
Nandini Jammi
03:24
Brand safety
is the practice of keeping your brand safe from toxic and dangerous content on the web. That was the original goal of brand safety.
Today Brand safety
has evolved to include in our opinion, disinformation, hate speech and other content that leads to real-world violence and harm.Share
Claire Atkin
03:44
Yes. So it's the idea that as a brand, you don't want to be sponsoring anything that is antithetical to your brand values when you're advertising on the open web, you can be anywhere on the open web. So that's like literally any website unless you set guidelines about where you don't want to be.
Share
04:02
And advertisers on mass have basically decided that they don't want to be anywhere near things that promote drugs, things that promote violence, things that promote sometimes pornography, it depends on the ad and they have said sort of universally within the industry that there is this floor that is like the brand safety floor where the bar is on the floor for this.
Share
04:28
So when we're discussing the disinformation economy or hate speech, we're always talking about the
brand safety
floor, like the things that are most obviously brand unsafe for most advertisers.Share
Nandini Jammi
04:41
That's right and you know, most advertisers do agree that they don't want their ads on hate speech and disinformation. I mean that umbrella covers so many things that advertisers don't want to be associated with. And that includes very specific things like racism and xenophobia,
transphobia
, misogyny, sexism, and so on.Share
05:01
Back in 2016 I was running
Sleeping Giants
, the first social media campaign that alerted advertisers that their ads were on Breitbart
. And this was like some of the biggest brands in the world learning for the first time that their ads were funding, you know Breitbart
disinformation.Share
05:19
And um in fact one of the first brands to publicly acknowledge and block
Breitbart
was Kellogg,
the cereal company. And that was because they clearly did not want their ads to be funding things that were bad for their brand first of all and their customers and stakeholders as well.Share
Quinta Jurecic
05:40
So Claire you've you've mentioned this idea of the disinformation economy and I think you've kind of touched on that in terms of discussing advertising and
brand safety
. But can you spell out what you what you mean there? Because I think if I'm getting you write you are referring to economy not in a metaphorical sense but in a in a literal sense, in terms of the exchange of money. Is that right?Share
Claire Atkin
06:02
That is absolutely right. So we are dealing with a media landscape where because of digital advertising
clickbait
is profitable. So the more clicks that a website receives, the more money they will get because the more advertising they will get. And what that means is that when you incite a certain emotion within an audience you're going to get more advertising.Share
06:27
So we have created this economy where the bad faith publication of content around especially sensitive social issues like
COVID-19
, Black Lives Matter
, transphobia
. Anything that they can really whip their audience up with, they will make money off of it thanks to digital advertising unless something changes in the digital advertising economy. And that's what we're advocating for.Share
Nandini Jammi
06:55
Yeah. And that really means that we need to help advertisers realize that, "No this is not content that is on you know one side or another side of the political spectrum", which is how a lot of advertisers and the industry as a whole seems to be interpreting it today.
Share
07:13
We need them to understand and again use these very specific terms like we did before around racism or you know
Covid
disinformation which seeks to mislead the public about the efficacy of vaccines and so on.Share
07:30
And we need to put a stake in the ground as advertisers and say we're not going to fund this because this is bad for not only our customers, but it's bad for the society that we want to live in and operate our businesses, and that that really is part of the battle that Claire and I are taking on and
Check My Ads
.Share
07:49
We realize that there's a lot of misinformation about disinformation and the industry and so we um we're seeking to educate and we're seeking to help advertisers find their way forward in this industry can I ask to get a little bit more specific on the idea of brand unsafe?
Share
Evelyn Douek
08:08
Like when you're suggesting to advertisers that they don't want to appear next to certain content, are you appealing to a commercial consideration or are you asking them to take a political stance? Like, I don't know that people think of special k as you know, a social justice warrior company.
Share
08:24
And I'm not sure that they would, I don't know if they would necessarily want to be thought of in those terms. So is the question of brand unsafe t purely a commercial consideration or is it something more values-oriented? I guess I'm asking, you know, are you purely appealing to their business interests or some sort of other value system?
Share
Claire Atkin
08:45
That is such a good question. And I have two answers for you. So the first is that we thought that it was going to be a question of PR and we thought that it was going to be a question of brand reputation.
Share
09:02
And when we launched
Check My Ads
as an agency first before we were a nonprofit watchdog organization, we were an agency helping Fortune 500
companies stop funding hate speech and disinformation with their ads. And we never reached out to advertisers, we only worked within bounds. So they always came to us and they were concerned from a public relations perspective of course, but what we actually learned is that the people themselves doing the advertising, running the campaigns, making the case for whatever they were doing within their marketing strategy, they themselves could not stomach the idea that the money that they were spending these hundreds of millions of dollars that they were spending on the open web was going to fund things that made their families their communities, their friends more endangered.Share
09:53
So I realized that I had been unfair that I was thinking about it only from a business perspective, but actually, you know, marketers are human too. They all, they, we all live in the same society and we're all concerned about the same thing. And so the people we work with are people who are taking a personal responsibility for where the money goes.
Share
10:14
The second part of my answer is that, no advertisers do not want to be political. So to get around that, what we do is we always say, don't look at this from a political landscape. You're not taking a political stance with your advertising unless you want to do that instead. You can look at it in terms of disinformation versus journalistic standards.
Share
10:39
And when you think about it in terms of journalistic standards, then the politics part falls away a little bit and that makes it a lot easier to have the conversation about what is and is not appropriate use of your brand logo of your brand ad campaign dollars. And it clears up a lot of the problems that are in front of us.
Share
Nandini Jammi
11:01
Yeah. And I'll add that, you know, marketers today care so much about brand. Brand is the most important thing to a business today more than ever. You know, brand equity, brand reputation, how people feel about us, how they're talking about us on social media: that matters a lot.
Share
11:18
So for a marketer that spends so much time deciding what your logo looks like on your product, what your brand colors are going to be, you know, making your campaigns pixel perfect. It's a bit ridiculous to think that you don't know where your ads are being placed after all that work.
Share
11:38
Are you just throwing your ads up on the internet on disinformation sites and and and all kinds of dark corners of the web? And that's what we're trying to get at because marketers today have almost forgotten what it means to place your ads on the internet because for the most part we have given that task away to ad tech companies that do that job for us.
Share
12:01
So when it comes to taking back that control of where our ads are going, marketers don't even know where to start. And so that's what we help them to do.
Share
Quinta Jurecic
12:11
So let's talk about the technical aspect of this, How does
brand safety
normally work? Like for a major brand that's concerned about their brand, you know, not appearing against something that they don't like. What kind of steps or tools or technology would they typically use to prevent their content appearing next to material that they think might harm their public image and how sophisticated is that technology?Share
Claire Atkin
12:36
So within the ad tech world there is a whole industry that is dedicated to
brand safety
. And those companies are companies like Integral Ad Science,
DoubleVerify, Moat, Grapeshot, Comscore
... there's a whole bunch that you can sort of add on to your ad campaign to say, "Please help me navigate where my ads should go and where they shouldn't go". And They are very good at one specific thing: they are very good at noticing when there is a word on a page and then blocking an ad or letting an ad go onto the page depending on whether that word is for instance in the url.Share
13:23
And over and over again we have found that this multi-million like... many multi-million dollar industry is doing far more harm than good when it comes to the purpose of
brand safety,
which is to make sure your ads stay on the good sites and make sure they do not go on to the bad sites. Because it turns out disinformation and hate speech is not identifiable using keywords.Share
13:52
But news articles about the same kind of subjects that you might assume, bad faith publishers would talk about, are very easily blocked by keyword lists. So we've actually found and reported on the problem which is that news is getting blocked by the
brand safety
industry and disinformation is getting a hall pass.Share
Nandini Jammi
14:15
They also use this other technology that they started to push especially in the last few years because the concept of
brand safety
is a number one priority for marketers today. Like every marketer on the market cares about brand safety
. And so they've introduced what they say is a sophisticated new technology called and they have tons of different words and terms for it.Share
14:38
You'll hear contextual analysis, contextual intelligence, semantic analysis. So it's some combination of these words and they're all basically pushing the same quote technology and that is the idea that they can scan a page and figure out what the topic is, scan the page like a human and figure out what the topic is, what a human feels when they read it, so whether it's positive, negative or neutral sentiment and whether it's safe or unsafe to place a brand on based on a bunch of categories and basically like a bunch of buttons that the advertiser has clicked.
Share
15:19
So an advertiser, well most advertisers will want to click on positive sentiment topics about, you know xyz, right? Like most advertisers if you come up to an advertiser and say, "Do you want to advertise on positive or negative news?" They're probably going to say, "Positive", right? Like why would we want to be on negative news?
Share
15:40
So what they do is they're categorizing the entire internet according to an algorithm whether on what topic it is on, whether it's positive or negative and advertisers are just going with it. But the problem is advertisers don't know what's underneath that algorithm or how it works or what the results of that algorithm is.
Share
16:00
For example if you're looking at the topic
Black Lives Matter
or "police brutality", well how do you know what a human is thinking, right? Like how do you know how the algorithm decided whether Black Lives Matter
article is positive or negative? Because for some people coverage of Black Lives Matter
is a really good thing and for others it's not. So how does this algorithm work? How is it making those decisions?Share
16:24
Because that algorithm is making decisions at scale for advertisers with billions and billions of dollars invested that is being scanned through this
brand safety
technology, the biggest advertisers in the world depend on this technology to decide how their money is distributed across the web.Share
16:43
And we have found in our research in our newsletter branded that we've published that overwhelmingly this technology doesn't work. It doesn't work like they say it does, we found them blocking disproportionately advertising from anything related to crime.
Share
17:01
So what some of these
brand safety
technology companies do is they mistake the algorithm mistakes articles writing about crime and the news and local news about crime. They mistake it as promoting crime. And then they count that as bad and then they just block all of that news reporting, all that critical news reporting.Share
17:22
We released a report that found that 90, over 90% of the crime one of the crime reporters at the
New York Times
basically his entire beat is considered brand unsafe. So just brands without even realizing it probably are keeping their ads off of just New York Times
as crime section.Share
17:44
We even found that
Marilyn Stasio
, the New York Times
book review writer for crime fiction her entire beat like all her columns because they use the word crime and they use words that this algorithm thinks is bad or promoting crime. Her entire beat is basically unprofitable, like the brands are not on there because again the algorithm thinks it's bad.Share
18:09
So what we're experiencing as a result of both keyboard block listing and this basically this broken shoddy technology is that, a we don't know where the money is going. So add like even advertisers, the people who are using and buying this technology, they don't know how their money is being spent. And two it is being overwhelmingly and disproportionately being sent to the wrong places on the internet.
Share
Evelyn Douek
18:38
Yes, so I definitely want to come back to the issue of how the speech that advertisers are interested in supporting or appearing next to you might be very different to the speech that we think is important or is valuable and the way that this sort of online economy works isn't well suited to making those to align.
Share
18:59
But I want to dig in a little bit more to the questions of the failures of the technical failures of this system, like how it ends up being so hopeless because I think again, listeners won't be surprised to hear that the tech that they use is really pretty dodgy.
Share
19:13
You know, that keyword searches often misfire and surprisingly they can't tell the sentiment of a page just by using ai we come across that problem all the time in content moderation and hate speech detection and things like that.
Share
19:27
But the idea that advertisers also have no idea where their content is ending up on the web might be a bit more surprising because, you know, we hear a lot about how sophisticated the online information ecosystem is, how advertising, the online advertising system is super effective and super, you know, you can get micro analysis of everything that's going on.
Share
19:48
And yet your website says, we found a
Check My Ads
in response to the most pervasive problem in the advertising industry, marketers are in the dark about where their ads end up online and those ads are inevitably ending up in bad places on the web. And so what's driving that failure?Share
20:03
Is it just that advertisers don't have enough bargaining power with their ad exchanges to insist on getting that information is that they don't really care until something blows up and they get pressure from you or is it just that it's technically too difficult to track where they had to end up. Like why don't they have that information?
Share
Claire Atkin
20:23
Yeah, you nailed it. It's all of those things. The people who reach out to us the most are people in comms departments who are having to deal with social media crises. And to get from the Comms Department to the Advertising Department in a
Fortune 500
company. You often have to jump from silo to silo. So when we are having these conversations were often pulling together comms and marketing and brand and advertising. And so right off the bat, it's an exercise in corporate diplomacy. Right? Just to check your ads. Just to start.Share
21:03
Then it's technically difficult. The ad exchanges that they work with. They often don't want to give all of the data. That would have been helpful to find out exactly where your ads are placed. They'll say they'll give top-line key performance indicators, but they don't tell you off the bat necessarily what the conversion rate was or what you are l like what sub-part of the domain you were on.
Share
21:30
And our clients have had to fight for that kind of data and sometimes they get it and sometimes they don't. Right now the power discrepancy is such that there is a handful of ad exchanges whose names, most people don't know who decides where to put $400 billion dollars every year.
Share
21:53
And we always talk about
Google
, we always talk about Facebook
, we always talk about Twitter
, but the disinformation economy makes money from these handful of ad exchanges, and these ad exchanges are so powerful that actually they're not that responsive to our clients, even if our clients spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on their platforms.Share
22:15
So we have to uncover who these ad exchanges are and what they're actually doing and that's really what we see our job as.
Share
Nandini Jammi
22:25
That's right. Ultimately we believe that advertisers should be able to control where their ads are spent and how their budget is spent. They have a right to do right by their company values and their company mission and to do right by their customers. And as a marketer, I know that it pains me to see brands that I know don't want to be anywhere near this stuff having their ads repeatedly show up on the exact content that they don't support.
Share
22:55
So it's not really a radical idea when you think about it. Advertisers should know where their ads go. They should be in charge of how their money is spent and they should... they should have a right to check their ads.
Share
Quinta Jurecic
23:09
I'm curious what you think this state of affairs says about the online advertising ecosystem in general, you know whether focusing on the individual ad placements is downstream from what sounds like a much bigger problem, which is the sort of the structure and opacity and incentive structures of the online advertising industry.
Share
23:32
Last week, we had a tim hang on the podcast and he was arguing that, you know, online advertising is broken the market as a bubble and that the opacity contributes to that. How do you think about your work in view of the larger sort of problems in the online ad industry?
Share
Claire Atkin
23:50
Tim Hwang's book, Subprime Attention Crisis is so important and it's short if your audience hasn't read it yet, I recommend it. In it, he called for an "ad tech watchdog". And
Nandini
and I both read the book and we both highlighted that same paragraph because his thesis is such that this is a bubble, It is it is a lemon market, like you can't tell what the quality is when you're buying an ad campaign. You can't tell if you're going to be like what percentage of ad placements are actually a value and what's what are not, what our lemons.Share
24:24
So it's a lemon market, which means that the seller, the ad exchanges, has far more power within the business relationship than the advertiser. And his thesis is that the advertisers when this really hits home are going to leave the market and if this market holds up the internet, it will affect all facets of our media landscape if we're not careful.
Share
24:50
And so what our theory of changes as
Check My Ads
as the ad tech watchdog is to help bring to light things that are the most likely to dismantle the ad industry over time so that we can let the bubble down slowly, or at least bring attention to advertisers so that they have the choice. Because otherwise it's just going to keep going up and up... And I mean bubbles are bad.Share
Evelyn Douek
25:18
So I'm curious how you pick what content to target.
Share
25:23
You know, one of the defining questions of the last half-decade of the internet really has been how someone, anyone who should draw the lines for acceptable and unacceptable online content and what to do in the gray areas, you know, the name of our podcast arbiters of truth comes from, you know, the protests that platforms sort of disingenuously make about how hard it is to make content moderation rules because they really, really don't want to be and shouldn't be the arbiters of truth.
Share
25:50
And there are some legitimately hard issues here. And so I'm curious not all of them are hard issues, but there are some hard issues. And I'm curious how you think about that when you're picking which brands to target which sites you want to draw attention to and whether, you know, that's informed by what you think advertisers will be most receptive to, or how it is you go about picking what campaigns to run?
Share
Nandini Jammi
26:14
Well, I would say that some of the issues are difficult and others are extremely easy. And what we're doing at this time is bringing attention to what we think is the lowest hanging fruit, the most obviously dangerous individuals in our society. People who are causing again real-world violence and harm.
Share
26:34
And so we launched
Check My Ads
institute back in October and just a few weeks ago and the start of this new year, we launched our defund the insurrectionist campaign where we picked six individuals that we either promoted, organized or incited the J 6th attack on Capitol Hill and are also funded by the ad tech industry.Share
27:03
Many of these individuals have or their businesses have direct ties to ad tech companies. We're not just talking, you know, like the way that they post on
Facebook
. We're talking about shared contracts and bank account information. You know, they may have sales reps within the companies.Share
27:22
So this is a real business relationship. And so we want advertisers to understand that when they contract out their advertising to some of these ad exchanges, that their ads run the risk of appearing on this type of content, content that incited the insurrection.
Share
Claire Atkin
27:41
Yeah. We are not playing in the gray areas here. We're like, we're talking about
Dan Bongino
and Steve Bannon
and Glenn Beck
like these are very obviously brand unsafe people. They make money often citing real-world violence. Real-world hate.Share
27:55
I don't have to tell anyone here that hate crimes are on the rise of white nationalism is a concern and that there is a plot to overthrow the next election. Like we're talking about serious, very real issues and there there is no gray area and when we speak to advertisers at 14, companies, they don't worry about this as a gray area, they want to stay away.
Share
Nandini Jammi
28:23
And again, the fact is that a lot of the time they don't even know until they check their ads. And so with this campaign, what we hope to do is to inspire folks in marketing and in advertising who have access to this information to get it. We want to inspire them to speak up within their companies and say, hey, this is a problem.
Share
28:47
If
Check My Ads
, the ad tech watchdog is bringing this up, we need to take a closer look at it. And we want to give them the sort of, you know, permission to be proactive about their ad spend. Like Claire said earlier, this can be a bit of a diplomatic issue or people don't really understand necessarily what role that say Charlie Kirk
had in the insurrection.Share
29:09
So we're trying to really highlight the things that they did and the role that they played in this event and tie that back to, you know, the advertisers and what their values are and not just the advertisers, but the ad exchanges which have in their own publisher policies and their own supply policies, legal clauses against working with people that I think I was just saying yesterday literally some of them have language around inciting violence against the government.
Share
29:38
You know, clauses against misleading narratives, clauses against harassment, abuse and so on. This is all in their own language. So we're not creating new rules here. We're not asking for anything that didn't exist before.
Share
29:52
This is this is there In writing, it is the ad exchanges legal agreement with the advertiser and we're asking them to enforce it. So what we're doing is we're empowering advertisers to go to their ad exchanges and ask them questions and ask them to cut these people off on behalf of their customers and on behalf of their values.
Share
Quinta Jurecic
30:11
So, I wanted to ask you about your your January 6th campaign, you've already sketched out, sort of a little bit of what you're doing and what the goal is. Have you gotten any traction? Have you had success? Is what it looked like from your end?
Share
Claire Atkin
30:25
Yeah, the response has been surprising. So normally when we publish our newsletter branded, we are publishing the story of a connection between an ad exchange and a disinformation outlet and the ad exchange usually ends up dropping that disinformation outlet.
Share
30:43
And this has been a very different campaign because we launched and immediately it was like everyone in the advertising industry froze. Very few people are talking about it publicly. I think we've made a lot of people uncomfortable and we are watching
YouTube
dropped Dan Bongino
, but we're watching Google
ads very closely to see if they're going to follow suit.Share
31:10
Bongino
is already talking about it as if it's a threat, Tim Pool
came into my Twitter
dms and among other things said that we had lost him advertisers but I didn't ask him for clarification, and we're sort of waiting and seen. But with the message has been received internally, I think they're afraid of making the first move.Share
Nandini Jammi
31:34
You have to understand that some of this is obvious. We can see it on the browser when we just click over to their sites and we can see ads. But what we're also doing is monitoring the behind-the-scenes. There are many companies in the advertising supply chain and it's not always obvious what's happening.
Share
31:51
Certainly, I can't confirm or deny anything at the moment. We do need to do some additional technical work. But we are seeing some changes on some of these, some of these insurrectionist websites, but you'll have to wait and see or subscribe to Branded to get our updates on that.
Share
32:10
The fact is that a lot of these ad exchanges, by the way, don't tell us when they're dropping a website. It's extreme. It's just astonishing the amount of shenanigans at play within these ad exchanges, they will, you know, they will add someone like
Bongino
and then in the middle of the night and the cover of darkness, they'll get rid of them.Share
32:35
And we have a few tools at our disposal that we can kind of see what's happening. But we, because we can't get that confirmation from them because they will not email us back sometimes or they just ignore us. We have to use technical tools to be able to see who's still working with these outlets or accounts and who's not.
Share
Claire Atkin
32:57
Sometimes we get inside scoops.
Share
Nandini Jammi
32:59
Tipsters are extremely welcome.
Share
Evelyn Douek
33:01
You would never have guessed your your marketing background with the excellent placement of the newsletter name. Very nicely done.
Share
Nandini Jammi
33:11
What us, marketers?
Share
Evelyn Douek
33:14
Yeah. I actually wanted to follow up on how you track the success of your campaign because it struck me as really interesting, you know, if one of the key problems is that advertisers don't know where their ads are ending up. and the capacity of the entire system, it strikes me that that would be a problem for you to exactly like you're saying.
Share
33:33
And I'm curious how you get around that problem, like how we sort of trust anyone when, when they're saying so for example, I was reading just in
the Washington Post
today or yesterday, a story about Steve Bannon
claiming that once he was banned from YouTube
, his audience size increased by 10, and you know, it gets so much more attention and revenue and things like that.Share
33:55
And I'm just wondering how we would can or trust any of these statements about advertisers saying they're dropping certain placements and things like that, when the whole problem is that the system is so opaque?
Share
Nandini Jammi
34:07
So the short answer is that you cannot trust anything that
Steve Bannon
says. What was it just a few weeks ago, dan Bongino
came out swinging, saying that, That his revenue had gone up 134% since the time that we lost him six ad exchanges. That's an interesting business model. Your ad revenues go up when you lose ad exchanges, that is frankly impossible.Share
34:37
So they're basically lying. They are they come back to
YouTube
and Facebook
and Twitter
for a reason, those alternative platforms do not work, they do not have the same engagement or economies of scale once they are kicked off or deplatformed from one of these social media platforms or ad exchanges, their audience dips, I mean, it gets cut off real fast and it's very difficult for them to grow that back to get that back.Share
35:08
So it's it's of tantamount importance of for them to uh to stay on these platforms. There's there's a reason that
Bongino
said, you know, I'm leaving Twitter
and then never left Twitter
.Share
35:21
There's a reason that they come back to, and this is a little bit off topic, but I've I've noticed that so many of these, these individuals, these bad faith actors, they love
Mailchimp
, they just keep coming back even though Mailchimp
keeps kicking them off.Share
35:36
And a lot of the time it's because I emailed them or or tweet at them, they like the same services that we do, and they grow on the services that offer the best features and offer the most money and that's the mainstream services that will kick them off because they have a greater responsibility to their customers and to their stakeholders than the alternatives do.
Share
Claire Atkin
35:59
Yeah. And you had a question around like, well how feasible is it to do like ad placement by ad placement? And the answer is not feasible, which is why we focus not on a per campaign basis, but we focus on the sort of evergreen relationship between the ad exchange and this purveyor of disinformation and hate speech.
Share
36:20
And we think about it kind of like a grocery store, like you wouldn't put bleach amongst the peanut butter and be like, look at all this delicious peanut butter because that would be doing business in bad faith. And so when we find bleach, we point out that people probably aren't going there for that.
Share
36:43
And more often than not ad exchanges do drop the disinformation that we find because they know that it's in their marketing materials, it's in their terms of agreement, that they do not work with anyone who incites real-world violence, they themselves say it. So we're just asking them to hold themselves up to their own standards.
Share
Nandini Jammi
37:05
Yeah. Often what happens is they just they'll just drop it and they'll never tell us. And we find out on our own because they don't really have an argument against our work. I mean, we've never really seriously been challenged by the ad the advertising industry, particularly these ad exchanges that we target, they know that they're in the wrong and they're just doing it until they get caught. So we'll just keep catching them.
Share
Quinta Jurecic
37:27
Do you ever worry at all about this kind of strategy being used by people with a different set of political beliefs? So, like I could imagine some world in which advertisers are targeted by a public campaign by pro-Trump groups or pro insurrection groups, If they ran ads on websites that were anti-Trump, that that seems like an approach that could be used by anyone, right?
Share
Nandini Jammi
37:52
Oh God, I don't worry at all. Not even for a second.
Share
Claire Atkin
37:55
We're not remotely worried, because we always say this is up to the advertiser. Like as an advertiser, you have brand values and brand standards,
brand safety
guidelines. And if someone came to you and they said, you know, "This website is not pro-Trump
enough or it's too pro-Biden",
then the advertiser and the ad exchange could both say, "Where is it outside of our bounds of our terms of service".Share
38:23
And if they are outside the bounds then of course they have good reason to. But I don't think that this is a political discussion, we're talking about the bad faith publication of incredibly violent content and material. This is not a question of politics. This is beyond pale.
Share
Nandini Jammi
38:44
This is like beyond the political spectrum. I mean, a lot of our bad faith detractors will say, "So you want to ban everything that you don't agree with?" No, I don't want to ban anything. We don't want to ban anything. We just want advertisers to be able to look at something and say that's not appropriate for our brand. And right now they don't even know that their ads are there.
Share
39:07
So we're just making that information available to them and they can choose what they want to do. And they're not going to choose to advertise on racist or misogynist or any of that other hate content because they have a myriad of considerations that goes beyond advertising. They also need to think about their brand responsibility. That's one thing and it's a bit more abstract, but they also have to think about recruitment.
Share
39:31
I mean, you can't get the best employees and you can't get the best stakeholders and you don't get the customers that you want into your company when you advertise on content like that. So we don't worry advertisers when given the choice, they will do the right thing.
Share
Evelyn Douek
39:49
So from one thing that doesn't worry you at all to another thing that I suspect does not worry you at all, but I'd love to draw you out just a little bit more on these, you know, the critics, let's say you're against free speech, this is an authoritarian mindset, you know, you wanna clamp down and everything needs to be politically correct, why are you against free speech?
Share
Nandini Jammi
40:10
That says the purest form of free speech. Because, you know, because an advertiser has a right to put their ads where they want you have your right to express what you think of that, and they have a right to respond. All of those things, including, you know, you know,
Breitbart
, you know, saying what it wants, everyone is saying what they want, everyone is expressing what they want in this relationship. It just happens to not work out financially for a publisher like Breitbart
, but everyone is using their voice as designated by the First Amendment
.Share
Quinta Jurecic
40:50
I'm curious how how you think that the rise of sort of all platforms that cater explicitly to a far right clientele complicate this. So, we we've been talking about
Steve Bannon
part of the story with Steve Bannon
is that he's been deplatformed from any number of services, but apparently, according to the Washington Post
has found a sort of a stable home with a small television network and is breaking in the cash for that network.Share
41:16
Does the ability of these personalities to sort of run their content on multi-platforms, jump from one platform to another, use all platforms complicate the dynamics of what you're trying to do?
Share
Claire Atkin
41:27
Yeah. We'd like to call their bluff honestly. Like the advertising industry has universally rejected
Steve Bannon
and he has tried to sneak in back onto the platform so many times and he has been found and kicked off a lot of times, sometimes by us and we celebrate their right to build their own private platforms with their own private ad marketplaces.Share
41:56
And we also celebrate the rite of advertisers to go there if they wish And we can't name a single one who would.
Share
Nandini Jammi
42:05
That's right
Steve Bannon
is constantly sneaking his way back into the ad tech supply chain. We catch him every time. I feel like I've spent half a decade following him around and his little, you know, money trail. And most recently we found him on Real America's Voice being monetized by brands like GoDaddy
and NortonLifeLock
I think it was... Norton, Norton
antivirus and another one GoodRx
, GoodRx
. And I tweeted about it, and I'm not kidding you, 24 hours later they were gone.Share
42:46
But we were really curious to see how these ads ended up on, on
Steve Bannon
because we know that for example, go Daddy many times I said, we don't want our ads on Steve Bannon
, but their ads keep ending up there, if not as a video ad, it ends up there as, you know, like a tabula or rev content type add.Share
43:05
So so they do keep ending up there and it's usually through some kind of backdoor channel or through a middleman intermediary. There's all kinds of little sneaky ways that
Bannon
comes in and these transactions are made in a way that you'll never see, you'll never see Bannon's
name, you'll never see Real America's Voice.Share
43:25
We are starting to point this out that there's an agency called Performance One Media that does all the, or some of the sort of funneling of the cash. And so like Performance One Media will have relationships with ad exchanges and the ad exchanges payout to Performance One Media which normally like no one knows what Performance One Media is or whatever unless you investigate it, which we did.
Share
43:48
And we saw, and we learned that it was, it belongs to Robert Sigg, the same person who owns Real America's Voice. With the average person, the average marketer will not know that their ad money is flowing towards
Steve Bannon
via all these intermediaries, and that's part of the work that we do. We uncover that, and then once that is uncovered, those ads disappear, that's how it works.Share
Evelyn Douek
44:11
So this is a little bit of a hard pivot and the answer may be that this is not, you know, not something you spend a lot of time thinking about, but it is something I spend a lot of time thinking about and I can't let you go without asking you about another area where
brand safety
comes up a lot, which is to do with content moderation and the rules that the major social media platforms have about the content that they allow on their sites, and the idea that users aren't really the customers of these platforms, but advertisers are, and so if there's a group of stakeholders that can leverage their power to affect content moderation rules, it's the advertisers, but on the other hand, you know, Facebook
and Google
are so powerful that advertisers might not have very much leverage at all.Share
44:58
And so I'm just curious because you're obviously talking to a lot of advertisers and talking about
brand safety
and things. Is content moderation area that comes up a lot. Is this something that they spend a lot of time thinking about? I presume that you know, a lot of their ads end up on these sites as well. And so how do they think about brand safety
in those contexts?Share
Claire Atkin
45:17
They are also obsessing about this question. They don't want to sponsor or be associated with things that make the world more dangerous and they think about it from content moderation and they think about it in terms of influencers, influencers are a big topic of conversation? How do you know when an influencer suddenly becomes brand unsafe? What is the rubric that you use for this and how do you communicate that decision? Those are on the the tops of minds of marketers right now.
Share
45:47
I think that advertisers are deeply frustrated by the content moderation standards that they have seen to date. I mean we saw that with the
Facebook
boycott last year and we know that they would like alternatives and they know that we know that the system is not working for them as is, which is why we always say, you know, "Take 10% of your ad budget out of digital advertising out of Facebook
and play with it. Be creative".Share
46:18
Digital ads are in our field known as a spray and pray approach. Like they're not they are not highly regarded as the best marketing tactic. So why not exercise your creativity and try to think outside the box a little bit.
Share
Quinta Jurecic
46:35
So what's the endpoint here? Like what does success look like for you? It seems like you know, you're having success and pointing out individual advertisers sites, agencies, but that seems like a very sort of whack-a-mole solution to problems that you've acknowledged our big and systemic.
Share
46:54
So if you could, you know, wave a wand and fix something about the underlying ad ecosystem that's causing these problems, what would that be?
Share
Nandini Jammi
47:02
That's a easy and difficult question at the same time if I could raise my wand and make one thing disappear, it would be vanity metrics like clicks and impressions and views those are the building blocks of digital marketing today, it's what we grew up on, so to speak, it's the only marketing that I have ever known and as well as Claire and it's almost like there's no memory of what happened before that.
Share
47:31
Marketers don't know how to run a marketing campaign without the metrics that require them to track and surveil their customers and their audience across their entire digital as well as offline lives.
Share
47:46
And it's not necessarily resulting in better marketing. It's not getting us to where we want. It's not good for our society. So I think what success looks like for us is building a future with sustainable marketing practices that are consumer first, that don't require monitoring our customers and that think about marketing in terms of connecting with our audience in a meaningful way.
Share
48:17
And yes, I know that that's a vague answer, but we don't have any answers yet. I mean we've only experienced this one form of marketing since the rise of the internet. We don't know what marketing looks like without surveillance or tracking.
Share
48:33
And it's something that I don't think that Claire and I should necessarily be answering but we are ready to bring together a community of marketers and advertisers who are thinking up ways to do that. We want to create that community, we want to help too imagine what those solutions might look like and realize them together.
Share
48:57
Because we think that, you know, while there's a lot of conversation around regulation and what the government, the government's role in content moderation and platforming and de-platforming and all that stuff should look like.
Share
49:09
We think that the solution needs to be equally coming from marketers, we need marketers to support a marketing ecosystem that is respectful to consumers and respectful to our own practice and that's going to have to come from the ground up. That's going to have to come from us. So that's where we stand.
Share
Claire Atkin
49:31
Yeah, absolutely. And we started this nonprofit because we are deeply concerned about the state of the media ecosystem, and
Check My Ads
is just part of I would say a large team effort to try to ward off bad faith publication of anti-democratic political tooling and we're working in tandem with so many people.Share
49:58
I think success for for us is exactly what
Nandini
said, and I think on top of that if we can work together to build for instance, a news media ecosystem that is self-sustaining, that isn't losing jobs by the dozens all the time, then I would be so grateful for that.Share
Evelyn Douek
50:18
That's a good segue to something I wanted to sort of end up on, which is to circle back to the thing we sort of waved at earlier about the different conceptions of the kind of good content between maybe what advertisers want their ads to end up next to and maybe what we might think of as socially good content, right? Like content about
Black Lives Matter
or, you know, LGBT content.Share
50:42
These are, you know, real examples of where, you know, content gets demonetized or taken down because it's seen as quote-unquote controversial or something like that, and advertisers just want to steer clear of anything remotely controversial because it's just not worth the candle for them, rather than, you know, the kind of stuff that you're talking about, like the really not in the gray zone, really bad, that sort of stuff.
Share
51:07
How we think about sort of focusing on marketers when we're thinking about designing, you know, a good online information ecosystem. Because on one hand, it makes total sense because why isn't everyone talking about the advertisers, they're the ones that are propping up this entire system and so they're the ones that can have material impacts, you know, follow the money.
Share
51:27
But on the other hand, relying on brands and their reputational incentives and the fact that they're humans too, and have their own value system seems kind of sub-optimal in terms of, you know, designing the perfect online ecosystem.
Share
51:40
And so I'm curious how you think about those long-term dynamics about whether this is the way that we want the online sphere to be constructed, where we're focusing on leveraging pressure on brand safety as the means of controlling what we see online brand safety is just a small part of the larger concept that where you advertise matters.
Share
Claire Atkin
52:05
And this is not new. In fact, we've forgotten about it only because of the digital advertising industry. If you pick up a magazine at a store, you can immediately tell whether that magazine is a respected source of information within its industry. If it's a photographer magazine, then you have the best camera ads. If you pick up
Vogue
, you're going to see the very best fashion ads.Share
52:34
Advertising in these magazines because that's where they will get the most authority. And that's where they also offer their own brand equity to the magazine. You can trust the content in a photography magazine if it has good ads in it because you know that photographers will call out those ads if it's for a product that doesn't work very well.
Share
53:00
The geography of where our ads actually go is one of the most important parts of our campaigns. Which is why it's absurd to us that we are letting a handful of companies with questionable business practices take over our campaigns for us and place our ads on our behalf. I think that getting back to understanding brand equity and location is a huge part of this.
Share
53:29
It's something that has been forgotten for the sake of those high-level KPIs that
Nandini
was talking about earlier click-through rates and impressions which can easily be gamed and don't really mean anything.Share
Nandini Jammi
53:43
Yeah. And I think that looking at the bigger picture, the internet is disproportionately propped up by advertising and we've forgotten that there are other monetization models out there. So we think that by poking a hole in the system, we will create new forms of monetization and ways to support content creation that doesn't like solely depend on ads or opaque complex supply chain to get money.
Share
54:14
And in an ideal world, we would use what we have to facilitate direct relationships between creators and publications and advertisers. I guess we need to allow that to happen and for that next form of the web to bloom, we need to break down the current system.
Share
Quinta Jurecic
54:34
All right, well, as much as I would love to, to stick around and talk more about what that might look like. We are unfortunately out of time. Nandini and Claire, thank you so much for joining us.
Share
Nandini Jammi
54:45
It's been a pleasure, thank you so much.
Share
Claire Atkin
54:46
Yeah, thank you.
Share
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Quinta Jurecic
Nandini Jammi
Claire Atkin
Evelyn Douek