CONFIRMED: Elon Musk’s X lost a HUGE brand safety certification after our complaint

Hello, folks!

Hope you’re having a great Friday! X CEO Linda Yaccarino probably isn’t.

The company formerly known as Twitter has lost its most coveted seals of approval in the ad industry. Linda is going to have a much harder time getting advertisers back now.

Late last summer, we learned that Trustworthy Accountability Group had quietly renewed X’s Brand Safety Certified seal — and immediately filed a formal complaint. Anyone who’s been on the platform since Elon Musk took it over knows the cesspool it’s turned into. Musk’s own antisemitic comments drove away advertisers like Disney, Lionsgate, and Apple.

TAG was formed as an industry body to create trust and transparency in the ad marketplace. In reality, it’s a pay-to-play rubber stamp, funding itself largely through hefty certification fees. It doesn’t do any audits on member organizations itself, instead relying on them to audit themselves or hire a third party. The only thing it’s independently auditing is if a check clears.

Conveniently, TAG also does not update advertisers or the public about the outcomes of their investigations. And since TAG CEO Mike Zaneis doesn’t respond to our emails, we keep an eye on changes through its online registry.

This week, TAG's entry for X went from looking like this:

To looking like this: 

We emailed Todd Miller, TAG’s VP of policy and compliance, and he confirmed it: “X Corp does not hold TAG’s Brand Safety Certified Seal at this time.”

This is a big blow for X’s ads business — they’re definitely not getting back all those advertisers who left over brand safety worries.

As for TAG? They are on notice. If Twitter can maintain a brand safety certification over 9 months, what's the point of TAG?

How did the “firearms-friendly” ad network get into our supply chain?

Some interesting drama kicked off on Nandini’s LinkedIn that highlights how little the ad industry knows about its own financial partnerships.

In a post this week, Nandini called attention to a Topple, an ad network that runs ads for guns and ammunitions companies. Promoting guns and weapons is almost universally prohibited by the ad industry — and yet Topple had managed to partner with two reputable exchanges: PubMatic and Consumable. (Both companies have now dropped Topple after we flagged the relationship with them.)

That turned into a feisty LinkedIn exchange when Topple popped up to say that it never partnered with either of these ad exchanges. Despite our evidence, they claimed that we were wrong.

So who's correct? Obviously us. But it's not straightforward.

Consumable’s CEO told Nandini that Topple was originally accepted into adtech platform Sovrn's supply-side platform. Sovrn was then onboarded as a network onto Consumable's SSP in 2021. According to him, Consumable was not aware that Topple was in their inventory until Nandini brought it to their attention.

Picture it like this: Sovrn loads up a bunch of garbage websites into the back of their truck. They drive over to Consumable's house, where Consumable does a quick inspection — and then adds Sovrn's websites to their existing pile of websites. And then they go to market to find advertisers to run on them.

What does this mean? Consumable and Topple were in a financial partnership — but it's possible that neither of them knew it. The result? The "firearms-friendly ad network" had full access to ad budgets.

The only thing that’s clear in adtech is why it looks like an international money laundering scheme: no one knows who they’re in business with.

What We’re Reading

Large Brands Are Still Advertising on Made-for-Advertising Websites After Industry Outcry: Yet another huge report from Adalytics showed how hundreds of brands are paying to advertise on spam sites with help from major ad-tech firms, Catherine Perloff writes in AdWeek. Dr. Krzysztof Franaszek, the man behind Adalytics, appeared on The Big Story podcast to talk about his report and what can be done to stop MFA sites from draining ad spend.

A company linked to a large “pink slime” network is being hired by big publishers like Gannett: “Pink slime” are site that pretend to be local news outlets but actually have no local staff and don’t disclose they’re politically funded. That’s why it’s a BIG DEAL if the largest newspaper publisher in the US is working with company tied to a network of over a thousand of them, as Steven Monacelli reports for NiemanLab.

Thanks for being with us this week!

Hugs,

Claire & Nandini