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To our community,
I’m Sarah Kay Wiley, the Director of Policy at Check My Ads, and I lead our strategic policy work to hold a trillion-dollar, global, unregulated market accountable.
The digital advertising industry right now is rife with lies, scams, and manipulation. For decades, revenue to local news and trusted sources has declined, while the business model for harmful content has flourished. This broken internet has created unprecedented chaos for media companies, advertisers, and ultimately, society and democracy.
We don’t have to accept this as our normal.
The reality is advertisers, from major brands to mom-and-pop businesses, don’t know where their money is going. A long supply chain of adtech middlemen, data brokers, and verification companies work to make ad buying more complex, opaque, and expensive.
The good news: with common-sense regulations, we can right the system. By creating innovative policy strategies targeting the digital advertising industry in the US and the EU, we are driving true, systemic change.
And we depend on you—our community of citizens—to stand up for this issue. Your voices are the cornerstone of democracy.
We’ve been busy in the US and globally to advocate for greater transparency and accountability in the digital advertising industry. Here’s what we’ve been up to:
✔️ In Vermont, our COO Arielle Garcia testified before the Senate Institutions Committee in support of S. 71, the Vermont Data Privacy and Online Surveillance Act. “Without privacy laws like S. 71 that codify transparency and choice, include principles of data minimization, and restrict the use of sensitive data, these data-enabled harms will continue unchecked. All of this, so that data brokers and adtech companies can sell unsuspecting advertisers data with less than a 50% chance of being accurate? This is the alleged pinnacle of 'efficiency' that props up the industry’s complete disregard for consumer privacy,” said Arielle. You can watch and read her whole testimony here.
✔️ In California, we joined a coalition of consumer and privacy groups, led by Consumer Reports, in support of A.B. 566. This bill would require browsers and mobile operating systems to include a setting that enables a consumer to send an opt-out preference signal. Today, when a consumer wants to opt-out of the sale or sharing of their personal information for behavioral advertising, they need to express that choice to each and every one of the hundreds or thousands of businesses they interact with - including the adtech companies and data brokers they have never heard of. We believe that people deserve meaningful choice over their browsing history, location information, and other personal data. This bill would make it easier for California residents to exercise their right to opt-out under the CCPA, by giving them the ability to do so at the browser-level, instead of with each website they visit, app they use, or company that gathers data about them.
✔️ We are so proud to have collaborated with a task force of experts from across the creator industry, independent media, advertising industry, business and human rights, and tech policy in launching the Global Monetization Principles — a framework for the responsible governance of social media monetization.
Check My Ads in the Wild 🐾
Aditi Ramesh, second to the right, speaks at The Climate Information Integrity Summit
🇧🇷 Aditi Ramesh, our Policy Manager, spoke this week at The Climate Information Integrity Summit in Brazil. The panel, Advertising and accountability: turning ads and advertising industry into allies in support of information integrity, discussed advertising’s power in shaping the internet and the responsibility the industry has to create change. Stream the conference here.
🤖 Arielle Garcia, our COO, spoke on stage at Scope3’s inaugural Landscape conference, sounding the alarm that the outdated orthodoxy of brand safety urgently needs an overhaul, especially with the emergence of generative AI. “If you look at things, the proliferation of AI means MFAs [made for advertising websites] are only going to keep expanding,” she said. Thank you for having us, Christina Cubeta!
⚖️ Our COO also shared her thoughts with AdWeek about the DOJ's final remedies proposal in the landmark Google Search antitrust trial. The proposed remedies include a requirement for Google to give advertisers information about all of their ads placed using Google products.
While Google has "begrudgingly" given some more transparency to advertisers using their opaque PMax product, Google still withholds page-URL level detail, and granular cost and performance data, making it nearly impossible for businesses to make sure their ads are growing their business and not lining Google's pockets companies while funding illicit websites. Arielle says: "This is about the powerlessness of advertisers when they don’t have that access. It’s their spend, data, and prerogative to use it as they see fit”.
🗑️ “While agencies and marketers have bought data since the dawn of online advertising, difficulties assessing its quality have led to billions in wasted ad dollars. An estimate on ad spend lost to invalid traffic was pegged at $71.37 billion through 2024 according to the Wasted Ad Spend Report from Lunio. Last year, former UM privacy chief and current COO of Check My Ads, Arielle Garcia, made news for dismissing data from adtech vendors as “useless garbage” after accessing her own profile to find herself in 500 extremely contradictory audience segments.”
⭐️ Claire Atkin, our CEO, was honored to be included among ten other advertising industry leaders on Campaign Canada's Power Lists 2025: The More Power 10. “The internet is not some nebulous information superhighway. It’s a financial market. Once you see it that way, it’s easy to see what’s wrong,” she shared.
