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To our community,
I am beyond proud to share that on April 3rd, our Building Better Online Businesses Act (BBOB) was introduced in Vermont by state Representative Monique Priestley before the House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development.
For years, dominant platforms have acted as broker, exchange, and referee, rigging ad auctions, hiding fees, and siphoning revenue from advertisers and publishers. According to studies, more than 50% of every ad dollar never reaches the publisher—lost in a maze of opaque intermediaries. A single ad impression can pass through up to 20 vendors, each taking a cut. This is not innovation. This is exploitation.
The BBOB Act would put a stop to this cycle of self-dealing and abuse. Modeled after the recently reintroduced AMERICA Act, the bill would strengthen transparency and restore competition in digital advertising.
The BBOB Act would:
Place Limits on Common Ownership: This would prevent a single company from controlling both sides of the digital advertising marketplace.
Establish a Duty of Care for AdTech Brokers: AdTech vendors would be required to act in the interests of the advertiser and publisher clients they serve.
Require Know Your Customer (KYC) Rules: The financial sector has long been required to verify who it does business with to prevent fraud and money laundering. AdTech brokers would be held to the same standard.
Mandate Transparency: Page URL-Level and Log-Level Data: All AdTech brokers would be required to provide full Page URL- and log-level transparency so that advertisers can actually check their ads.
Check out Representative Priestly's post about the bill, and read the fact sheet here.
In related news, on March 13, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) reintroduced the bipartisan AMERICA Act—a landmark bill designed to eliminate conflicts of interest, increase transparency, and restore competition in the $700 billion digital advertising industry. With support from Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Eric Schmitt (R-MO), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Peter Welch (D-VT), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Cory Booker (D-NJ), this bill sends a powerful message: the era of unchecked ad tech dominance must end.
Here at Check My Ads Institute, we enthusiastically support the AMERICA Act and applaud the bipartisan effort. While this is just the beginning, we couldn't be more excited to continue our advocacy for a fair and transparent digital advertising ecosystem.
These issues do not just affect the big brands whose ad budgets are lost to fraud and waste. This work is about creating a better internet for everyone. Whether you're a small business trying to reach your audience or a news publisher trying to survive, this legislation is your fight too.
And thank you, our community, for joining our mission to build a better internet.
💰 With the support of our advocacy, last week U.S. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) formally requested the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate pervasive fraud within the digital advertising industry.
The letters to FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson and DOJ Attorney General Pam Bondi cite new research by cybersecurity and digital forensics firm Adalytics, exposing how major adtech vendors have failed to deliver the “real-time bot detection” that they promised. As a result, advertisements intended for human audiences instead were shown, for at least five years, to easily-identifiable bots operated from data centers, including bots on industry group bot lists.
According to industry estimates, digital advertising fraud accounts for approximately $84 billion annually, inflating advertising costs for businesses, non-profits, and government agencies. Senator Warner emphasized that such fraud not only wastes public funds but also undermines essential government outreach and recruitment efforts.
Affected federal government entities include the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the U.S. Census Bureau (Census), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the United States Postal Service (USPS).
✉️ A copy of Senator Warner’s letter to the FTC is available here.
✉️ A copy of the letter to the DOJ is available here.
Industry Moves 📊
Our advocacy work is making waves across the industry, creating the will needed to address these urgent issues:
✔️ The Wall Street Journal also investigated the issue of bot traffic in their article, Efforts to Weed Out Fake Users for Online Advertisers Fall Short. “Brands are supposed to be reimbursed if, after the fact, a verification company finds that a digital ad campaign had a significant audience of bots. Major ad-buying platforms that facilitate digital-ad auctions say they have refund processes for this situation. Yet ad buyers told the Journal they rarely seek refunds, since verification vendors report such low bot rates.”
✔️ Author and advertising legend Bob Hoffman commended our advocacy work to push the industry in Ad Contrarian: “According to the Check My Ads Institute, who have been cooperating with Warner in his scrutiny of online advertising, there is 'alarming evidence that adtech companies are misleading government entities and taxpayers, charities, and other businesses about their ability to detect and prevent fraudulent ad placements.'"
✔️ AdExchanger discussed the prevalence of bot traffic with more than a dozen industry sources in Verification Providers Missed Easy-To-Spot Bots, Says Adalytics. What Went Wrong? “'This was a detection failure,' the bot expert said. In other words, it appears the tech itself was to blame, rather than how the tech was applied.”
Even More Policy Updates🇺🇸
✔️ The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee held a hearing on “Big Fixes for Big Tech.” The hearing focused on how we can break up entrenched power, eliminate conflicts of interest, and bring long-overdue transparency to the heart of the internet economy. These efforts are crucial to preserving a healthy democracy where no single entity holds outsized influence over public discourse and access to our data. Watch the hearing here.
✔️ We stood alongside the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the National Consumers League (NCL), the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), and others in a comment filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) urging the CFPB to finalize rules that would protect consumers from harm caused by data brokers.
Check My Ads in the Wild 🐾
🗽Come say hello to Check My Ads at the Ad Age Data-Driven Marketing Playbook event in New York on May 22, where our Chief Operating Officer, Arielle Garcia, will be educating marketers on the critical issues impacting the digital advertising industry. This in-person conference is a must-attend event for brand and agency leaders who want to understand data utilization, privacy navigation, and how to navigate the changing landscape of the industry.
