Sleeping Giants Co-Founder Takes Next Step in Fixing Advertising

In addition to ushering in an era of uncertainty and chaos, the novel coronavirus pandemic has also laid the foundation for a reckoning across many industries, systems and social norms. The marketing industry is no exception. Advertisers have been pushed to reevaluate how systems of inequality are playing out within agencies, brands and publishers. Agencies, ad-tech firms and media companies are facing layoffs, and online platforms are under heightened scrutiny to police misinformation as the 2020 presidential election looms. Brands have responded by diverting ad spend away from reliable news sources in an attempt to avoid being placed alongside stories about Covid-19 and protests. But that has only served to highlight an existing problem in marketing: When programmatic advertising lacks transparency, the wrong people cash in. With the launch of their new company, Check My Ads, Claire Atkin and Nandini Jammi are looking to guide brands through the crisis to keep their brands safe, stop spending money where it’s not helping them and fund reputable news sources that desperately need it. By doing that, they believe they can help divert ad dollars away from the sources of disinformation and hate that are crippling democracies. How it all began Atkin and Jammi first met when Jammi was working with Sleeping Giants, the movement she co-founded after the 2016 presidential election to address how brands were funding hate speech and misinformation, and Atkin was directing a b-to-b marketing agency in Vancouver. They found each other on Twitter through a network of b-to-b marketers. “I noticed that [Jammi] had a really clear voice and had insightful and … visionary things to say about copy and positioning within copy,” Atkin said. “I noticed that her marketing skills were really good before I noticed anything else.” They also recognized in each other a smart, like-minded perspective on the industry. Over the next several months, they discussed the work Jammi was doing and what needed to be done to fix a problem they saw within marketing: that brands seemed unaware of how their ads reached certain websites and that they were inadvertently funding hate speech and disinformation. We would like marketers to be thinking about other ways to measure their relationships with customers in a way that isn't reductive and reflects the true nature of a relationship.Nandini Jammi Despite Sleeping Giants' three years of calling brands out for advertising on the websites of bad faith publishers—a blanket term used for fake news websites engaged in ad fraud or those peddling misinformation and conspiracy theories—the problem wasn't going away. Atkin and Jammi started to wonder whether the movement could address the problems it was intended to address. If brands were unable to control where their ads ended up, who was to blame for funding hate speech and misinformation, and how could it be stopped? “We were just in this vortex of what is marketing? How can we fix it?” Atkin said. Atkin and Jammi decided to start a newsletter, called Branded, about what they were discovering in their research. If they were going to figure out how to keep advertisers from inadvertently funding bad faith publishers, they needed to get as many industry people on board as possible. Branded's first edition went out in January with the subhead: "There’s something wrong with digital marketing—and we're going to find out what it is." As they worked through issues of brand safety, keyword blocking, ad fraud and what happens to ads as they travel through programmatic ad systems, their readership grew. They started to get subscribers from big-name agencies and brands and now reach about 3,100 people with their biweekly message. But as they walked readers through the ins and outs of ad tech and how to identify and avoid bad faith publishers, Atkin and Jammi started hearing from brands seeking more than just information on brand safety—they wanted guidance on how to begin to extricate themselves from the web they were entangled in. https://twitter.com/nandoodles/status/1286822574366785536?s=20 Check My Ads Atkin and Jammi launched Check My Ads on June 10 as a for-profit company to help brands do just that. On one level, it’s a simple task, but it requires a deep understanding of the ad-tech landscape and the risks brands face as their content snakes through ad exchanges and platforms. “We take a very human and nonalgorithmic approach” to analyzing a brand’s ad placement, Atkin said. They also look at brands' blocked keywords and help them cut placements that aren't working or are supporting bad faith publishers. After rooting out the bad stuff, Check My Ads works with brands to build out new ad strategies, incorporating things like clearer ad management tools and information on how to get ahead of social media crises. "We help our clients write brand guidelines and policies," Atkin said. Through workshops and meetings with leadership and education for the entire team, Check My Ads aims to "help marketing teams understand the landscape and how their media buying decisions can play out with consumers on social media." "That means helping them understand what brand safety means, what disinformation looks like and how social media crises form," Atkin said. "Our philosophy is that companies should get to draw the line on where their ads are served, and we're empowering them to make those decisions." We have an entire industry that is—by accident—causing bad people to be empowered. We are on the precipice of a 2020 American election, and the last one was a disaster in terms of disinformation.Claire Atkin What fuels Jammi and Atkin is twofold: They see brand safety as a business problem that needs a solution, but they also see a societal danger resulting from the lack of transparency. When ad spend is diverted away from reputable news sources and instead makes its way into the pockets of white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, society pays the price. “We don't want these issues in our communities, so we have to deal with them,” said Atkin. “We hear from marketers that they are also deeply concerned. And as a group, we are doing our best to understand the problem, to demand that ad-tech companies that we use also understand the problem.” The Facebook boycott Since Jammi left Sleeping Giants in July, she’s been vocal about the flaws of the Facebook boycott that her co-founder, Matt Rivitz, worked on. (Being excluded from that conversation was a “last straw” for Jammi after years of being sidelined at the movement, and she left shortly thereafter, explaining her decision in a Medium post.) Boycotting Facebook for a month, she said, is more performative than it is productive. And for small- and medium-sized businesses that rely on Facebook to reach consumers, asking them to opt out of an important revenue stream is simply unworkable. While the boycott did serve the purpose of drawing attention to the hate speech that’s been permitted to flourish on the platform (and that advertisers were largely unaware of), it didn’t provide brands with a productive alternative action. “What I have been advising people is to just start thinking about how you can reallocate a small percentage of your budget toward other channels and start to explore the world out there that goes beyond just performance marketing,” Jammi said. Rather than asking marketers to make decisions that are bad for their business, Check My Ads seeks to work alongside marketers that want to do better. “We would like marketers to be thinking about other ways to measure their relationships with customers in a way that isn't reductive and reflects the true nature of a relationship,” Jammi said, “the bigger picture of building a long-term brand that people love and trust and are loyal to.” Atkin and Jammi expect Check My Ads to grow as marketers continue to push for more transparency in programmatic advertising. “This is not a question of how ambitious we are; this is a question of how important the issue is,” Atkin said. “We have an entire industry that is, by accident, causing bad people to be empowered. We are on the precipice of a 2020 American election, and the last one was a disaster in terms of disinformation.”