Happy 3rd birthday to us!

In October 2021, Claire and Nandini launched Check My Ads with one goal: to rip the heart out of the disinformation economy.

What followed was the building of a community around campaigns to protect democracy by defunding insurrectionists. We pressured Magnite to follow its own policies when it came to Fox News. Advertisers dropped Steve Bannon after we showed them where their money was going.

But individual misinformation sites are the symptom, and we need to treat the disease: an adtech industry with no oversight or transparency.

So we adapted. We grew. It’s no longer about just one site, it’s about the entire ecosystem making misinformation and scams profitable, while stealing from actual journalism and real publishers. It’s about Google placing ads on policy-violating sites and not telling advertisers. It’s about putting innocent people at risk by not enforcing policies.

The strategy is paying off. This week, Google announced a change to the very same ad placement system we spent weeks pressuring them about. Adtech companies are updating their policies after we point out weaknesses. The United Nations’ push for adtech accountability underlines and follows our framework.

We also learned that we live rent-free in Google’s head 💁‍♀️, courtesy of some court documents:

A portion of Google’s 2022 Ad Safety Report Training from its most recent monopoly trial, mentioning Check My Ads.

And all this, all this, grew out of a passionate community of people like you who continue to show up and let the adtech industry know they’re not getting away with this anymore. Thank you, thank you, thank you for an incredible third birthday. Here’s to many more!

This is an NCIS episode I'd watch

Officials from the Department of Justice and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service are apparently nosing around Google, Integral Ad Science, and DoubleVerify, asking ad executives about the multiple brand-safety scandals revealed in Adalytics reports, Marketing Brew’s Ryan Barwick reported.

They’ve also been asking ad execs about conflicts of interest in brand safety company's business models, so we are thrilled to see that the dialogue we've started is reaching the right people.

The reports, that Google was inadvertently collecting data on children; that it was placing ads on sanctioned sites; and that it was putting ads on sites that violated its own policies, highlighted what we’ve long written about. Brand safety tech is opaque, conflicted, and unregulated, pervading the digital ad industry to the detriment of brands, publishers, and consumers.

Claire Atkin, eternal friend of the pod  

Claire popped up on Luke Szkudlarek’s Fixing the Game podcast to talk about programmatic ad fraud, Google’s role in it, and how the heck Check My Ads grew from two people to hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people who want to want to make the internet a better place.

“When you start to ask questions about things that really matter, people will come out of the woodwork and help,” Claire told Luke.

And she's right! Thank you all, again, for being here, for signing up, for showing up, for taking the 5 seconds to click open on an email, and for continuing to work together to fix the internet.

Forward!

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