For They Know Not What They Do
How to talk to your favorite brand about programmatic advertising and the far right.
I’m no nostalgist, but you don’t have to be to concede that the complexity of society has introduced arm’s-length transactions that split economics from ethics, often with devastating results. The financial crisis was abetted by the commodification of mortgages, which allowed irresponsible lenders to kick risk down the road — and avoid looking in the eyes of the people they had callously set up.
Something similar has happened with so-called “programmatic advertising” and its role in the rise of fake news and a renewed neo-Nazi movement. If you’re an activist and not a square — like me — you might not know what programmatic advertising is, so here are the basics.
- Once upon a time, about a hundred years ago, advertising was just another small business. Advertisers walked into the newspaper office and placed an ad. They, like everyone else, read the paper, so if the paper took an offensive position (by the advertiser’s lights) or put the ad next to something unflattering, the advertisers could address it with the paper, and pull or move their ads. We usually think about this as a corrosive aspect of ad-supported media — that advertisers can hold their budgets hostage to influence coverage. This is certainly true, and this aspect becomes more corrosive the fewer advertisers there are — as businesses consolidate — since each then grows in influence.
- With programmatic advertising, however, you do not have a relationship with a publisher — a website for our purposes— but with a third party. That’s old, too, of course. That’s what an ad agency is. The wrinkle with programmatic is that the third party does not go out and buy placements in specific publications. Instead, it targets specific people, and — thanks to the wonders of digital tracking — targets them wherever they happen to be. The example everyone will be familiar with is retargeting. You visit a product page on an e-commerce website and then the product follows you around in ads on all the other sites you visit — no matter what sites those are. Of course, you are a virtuous person so these ads follow you around as you visit The New Yorker, Mother Jones, or whatever. Those publications get the money. However, you might be a neo-Nazi and those ads would still follow you to Breitbart or Daily Stormer, and then those publications will get the money. True programmatic is more complicated than retargeting but the idea is the same. Advertisers are finding audiences — men who want to buy trucks, for example — and they do not care where they find them.
The upshot of all this is that though the influence of advertisers on content can be corrosive, the total absence of advertisers’ sensitivity to the company they keep is also corrosive, since it funnels money to a lot of very loathsome sites that would never, ever pass the smell test, even for your typical right-leaning ad executive. (Your typical left-leaning ad executive would likely be horrified. These are the people who drive corporate boycotts of North Carolina over anti-LGBTQ legislation after all.)
The problem is that they don’t know — and it is easy not to know — where their ads appear. Without this minimal check on decency, false, hateful, and normatively irresponsible speech is being funded by corporate America.
Enter @slpng_giants.
In just a few days, this anonymous Twitter account has secured commitments from Allstate, Modcloth, Nest, Earthlink and SoFi to add Breitbart to their programmatic blacklists. That means that they will exclude the Breitbart domain from the list of domains where they will allow their ads to appear — just like the advertiser a century ago who could pull his ads from the paper because he didn’t like their coverage, or because they were simply too controversial to be good for business. Breitbart and other sites on the extreme right should be bad for business, but activists are going to have to speak up to make sure that they are.
For more about programmatic, and @slpng_giants, read this article at Digiday:
