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August 09, 2024
Woohoo! We made it to Friday!
First, an apology. All this was my fault.
I made the classic newsroom blunder of saying, “It’s going to be slow,” on Monday while planning out the week for Check My Ads’ editorial team.
Then a Google monopoly decision came down. Then X sued GARM. Then a giant Adalytics report came out. Then we published our obituary spam story. Then GARM was dissolved?? If anything else happened this week, please do not tell me, I am very tired.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the week that definitely very much happened to all of us!
We got two sites that publish spam obituaries to stop
There’s a scourge of sites that make obituaries for names they see trending, even if they don’t know the deceased. They get important facts wrong. They load up the obituaries with ads. They hurt families and friends desperate for information about a loved one.
And we got two of the sites to pull all of their spam obituaries this week after we started asking questions.
It was the culmination of a weeks-long investigation into which adtech companies are making the sites profitable, and asking them why they’re working with these sites.
Most companies we emailed never got back to us. Google wouldn’t tell us if the sites violated their policies. TripleLift said it would launch an investigation into how it ended up on the sites and is updating its policies. The Verge, which covered this issue earlier this year, wrote up our report.
But word clearly got to the sites: obituaries are now nowhere to be found on them. Now it’s time to shut down some more.
Elon Musk’s petty hate machine The owner of X targeted GARM, a brand safety working group, with a lawsuit, alleging a conspiracy that was depriving X of ad revenue. And now it’s shutting down.
It looks like advertising leaders like PepsiCo and Mastercard want so badly to stay away from Musk that they would rather close GARM than deal with his bullying.
But this won’t solve Musk’s problem. Everyone can see that advertising on X is a treacherous business relationship for advertisers. And we know, based on public reporting, X doesn’t have all that many to lose. The upside is that advertisers will no longer rely on GARM, and will now take more direct responsibility over where their ads appear.
I doubt that will take the form of “run more ads on X.” More comments from Claire and Arielle on this:
A brand requested that the startup review its ad placements for brand safety, after being “told by their media agency holding company, by their demand side platform (DSP), and their brand safety verification vendor that the brand’s ad campaigns were 100% brand safe,” according to the report.
But after Adalytics reviewed where the brand’s ads were serving, that was definitely not the case.
As Arielle told Performance Marketing World: “Brand safety vendors' black-box tech, and 'set-it-and-forget-it' promises have yet again failed advertisers and publishers.”
So does this mean I can call Google a monopoly without worrying about being sued? This week, a US district court judge found that Google operates a monopoly in both search engine services and general search text ads.
And the decision included this banger: "The only apparent constraint on Google's pricing decisions are potential advertiser outcry....many advertisers do not even realize that Google is responsible for the changes in price.”
Couldn’t agree more! We’re eagerly following this to see what remedies the court demands.
Whew! OK, I think that was everything. We’ll see you next week. Have a great weekend, you earned it!
