Hello friends,

Back in June, I said I was logging off for a sabbatical — and true to my word, I stayed logged off. I took long walks, went to the gym, read memoirs and stayed up too late watching back-to-back documentaries. I got into baking bread. I got to know my neighbors. I spent time with my friends and their babies (or “new people”, as I like to call them).

Though many of my days could be classified as mundane, they felt whole and peaceful. But I can’t lie. Sometimes I would look at the blue sky and big, beautiful trees and think: “Wow, my personal data is being picked apart right now and put up for sale by strange foreign companies on the internet.”

Nandini at Quilotoa Lake in Ecuador

It just doesn’t add up. And it never will. We need something better.

This month, I returned to work with a renewed sense of purpose. This year at Check My Ads, I’ll be a little quieter than usual. I’ll be spending more time heads down in research projects — particularly those that paint a big fat bullseye around the out-of-control adtech industry.

It’s good to be back. Let’s go!

Check My Ads in the Wild

A new chapter begins. As we wrap up January, Claire's vision for 2025 is continuing to inspire us to work towards a more fair and transparent internet for advertisers, publishers, and people. As Claire said in her “electrifying keynote” at AdMonsters PubForum 2024, “If advertisers control their ad placements, we can build a media system that actually works for everyone.”

🗞️ Our COO, Arielle Garcia, spoke to the New York Times about Google’s recent policy change to no longer restrict advertisers from using trademarks that belong to other organizations. This has become a struggle for nonprofits buying Google search ads to reach donors, who are often constrained by smaller ad budgets. These nonprofits are now competing in search ad auctions against bids from other search engines like Ask.com, who outbid nonprofits to drive traffic to their sites using other organization’s trademarks. Arielle told the New York Times that this “was another one of those sneaky little ways that [Google is] able to juice the revenue from their products.” This time at the expense of charities and the communities they serve.

🎧 Listen to Arielle discuss the proposed Omnicom IPG merger and the future of agency holding companies with The Monopoly Report, and then queue up the DMEXCO Podcast to hear her talk about the $84 billion that is lost to ad fraud every year and how we can fix it. 

Watchdog Friends 🐾

This month our friends at Electronic Privacy Information Center and Irish Council for Civil Liberties urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate how Google’s Real-Time Bidding (RTB) system exposes Americans’ most sensitive data – including Americans’ employment with the military and intelligence community, locations, political views, financial problems, health, sexuality, ethnicity, and online behavior. As a result, America’s most sensitive institutions and industries are open to hacking, blackmail, and compromise by bad actors.

📢 We hope the FTC acts swiftly to protect Americans. You can check out the complaint here.

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