An industry starts to wonder if it’s garbage day

(Editor’s note: This community email is designed to be enhanced with audio. Please set this as your background music.)

A few weeks back, Arielle Garcia, director of intelligence extraordinaire, popped up on Mi3’s podcast and pulled the lid off the metaphorical trash can.

Using her own hilariously mistargeted data from an adtech vendor as a starting point, she showed how:

1. The data that adtech companies and data brokers have about us is garbage

2. The garbage is being repackaged and sold for targeting 

3. That garbage data is used to justify running advertisers’ ads in garbage places 

4. And because it’s in garbage places, the metrics are trash.

The adtech industry is eating its own garbage, and in doing so is doing what garbage does best: rots. But you don’t have to take our word for it!

Vinny Rinaldi, the head of media and analytics at The Hershey Company, agrees with what Arielle is saying: “The more we continue to rally around the future state of the industry, which is less reliant on garbage data, which brings garbage analytics and then in return garbage outcomes, the better we will be as an industry in 20-30 years from now."

After we started this conversation, Mi3 highlighted some studies suggesting audience targeting doesn’t make advertising more specific. An AdExchanger opinion piece calls for advertisers to reject “the outdated belief in the supremacy of addressable targeting and perfectly precise, deterministic attribution.”

The ad industry is starting to wake up from under the pile of garbage it’s buried itself in. And that’s a great thing. Because the less nose-blind they are to the rot, the more that their money will reach actual publishers, with actual readers, and support real journalism.

Arielle, elsewhere: The She Said Privacy/He Said Security podcast, where she talked about privacy and profit in tension in adtech.

The TikTok: Investigative report Rachel took a break from researching her next big piece to explain the adtech data garbage pile.

What we're watching

The European Commission let X know today about initially finding it violated the Digital Services Act. Specifically, the company breached ”areas linked to dark patterns, advertising transparency, and data access for researchers.” Sounds bad!

Web trackers on sites of some of the largest insurers, hospitals, and labs are sending your data to Big Tech, according to a new report from Bloomberg. Sounds bad x2!

On-brand Brandon on brands

Hello from behind the keyboard (a Keychron K6 Pro, for those interested)! I’m Brandon Hardin, managing editor of Check My Ads and the dude responsible for this newsletter and the bad puns that go with it.

I joined Check My Ads in June 2023, inspired by its mission to dismantle the disinformation economy and send some money back to quality publishers (speaking as someone who has spent over 20 years in journalism).

It’s been my pleasure to work on stories that shine a light on where brand safety is breaking down and that force Google to update its policies — and we’ve got so much more planned! It’ll be my signature appearing at the bottom of these emails from now on, but what’s in them remains a collaborative work from all of us at here at Check My Ads.

You can reach me with thoughts, story tips, criticisms, compliments, and dad jokes at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.

That’s all from us for this week! I hope you get the space to relax this weekend, and we’ll be back in your inbox soon.

Hugs,

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