Shifting the focus of the newsletter (since it never really got published consistently!) to highlight the interviews we are doing on The Changeup, with amazing people who have left the corporate world to build their own thing. We will publish twice a week with the full episode as well as a rundown of some of the best quotes from each interview.
First up, Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin, the Cofounders of Check My Ads Institute. Digital advertising was built on a false promise: the ability to track everything would lead to the right ad being served to the right customer at the right time. In reality, what it created was a massive multi-billion dollar arbitrage ecosystem where disinformation and bad actors pull money from advertisers who are unaware they are even running on these bad sites.
Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin created Check My Ads to shine a light on the dark, dirty world of ad tech and to help brands build a cleaner advertising mix. Their brave work is met with vicious attacks by ad tech founders who were making bank on the status quo.
You can listen to the full interview above and below are some highlights from the conversation.
On the ad tech supply chain:
Nobody talks about the fact that there's an entire supply chain of companies that work to, in theory, help to target. You would help to optimize an advertiser's ad spend to put the right message in front of the right person at the right time. That's really the promise of this very opaque, very complicated supply chain of this constellation of companies that claim they're able to help micro-target you as a consumer. But in reality, we don't actually know where this money is going or where these ads are ending up because they don't tell you that.
The problem is that these websites are plugged into the advertising supply chain because when they're plugged into the supply chain, they get three of the most valuable things in the world. One ads. 2. Dollars, Obviously, the money and 3. Data, so they gain access to our personal sensitive location data, they get access to where we live, what we do, where we hang out, what we eat, who our friends are. I mean, you know, this is the currency of everything right now, right? And it can be used to manipulate us. So it's really not about the ads at all. It's about the flow of money and it's about how that data that is also being traded across the world every day is being used against us.
Lack of transparency and trust:
Well, which ones are the toxic websites? If you ask if you, as an advertiser, go in and ask that question. Let me tell you, you're not going to get that answer. They're not going to give it to you. And that really is where the problem lies. There's a complete lack of transparency in the industry, and even if you are one of the most powerful Fortune 500 multimillion dollar budget clients, they will go out of their way to not allow you to see what is happening within your ad buy. Why is that, by the way? It's because they don't want you to see what else is going on within your ad buy. There's a lot of shenanigans happening in your ad buy.
On the disconnect between marketing creative and targeting:
What is happening, what is going on? And as a marketer, what we do with our teams is build a brand. We build colors. We build copy. We every campaign is agonized over because it means so much to us to show up in a way that is exemplary of our brand values and our products and our messaging. And then to give up. The very thing that is the essence of a campaign, which is where you are to give that up to an anonymous company or a company that doesn't represent your brand values at all. Is just mind blowing. It's like the last thing of the campaign you put in all this effort. And then the very last thing you do, you just throw it away.
On why they started Check My Ads:
We know that advertisers don't want to fund hate speech and disinformation because we've been around those boardroom tables. And then on top of that, we realize that we're having the same conversation over and over again that they didn't feel like they have the agency to stop funding hate speech and disinformation, that the power dynamic was not fair. There's an information asymmetry between advertisers and ad tech. And so what we realized is that this giant $700 billion industry has no watchdog. Nobody is holding them accountable. I mean, that's wild. So that's why we started the institute.
On personal harassment and vitriol they have received from the ad tech bad actors:
And it also makes us a serious threat to what their goals are, which are to pump out fake news, monetize and multiply with ad revenue and overwhelm the public and the media ecosystem so that they can win. And that means that they lash out, they lash out to their audience about us. They lie about who we are. They call us all kinds of misogynistic and racist tropes, racist for Nandini. And they incite harassment to us. We take it all very seriously. We've had to deal with law enforcement. We've had to deal with lawyers. We take our personal security very seriously. It's not a joke to us and we take our mental health very seriously. So I mean, all you have to do is go on the internet to see what kind of stories they're writing and it's all fake and it's all just part of a regular playbook.
Why brands can’t automate their way to brand safety:
OK, so there's something that we say over and over again at Check My Ads, which is you cannot automate your way to brand safety. And that means that you cannot rely on algorithms. We've seen how they work. We've seen demos. They literally block the news and they give white nationalism a hall pass. This is not working. The algorithms are not working as humans do, so the humans have to step in.
Nandini Jammi + Claire Atkin, Cofounders of Check My Ads Institute