The Skyrocketing Price Of An Eyeball
Companies must now choose between country and clicks
The perception you’ve been reading about is very much a reality. Fake and racist news sources are everywhere. Their effect on this last election is undeniable. What is also undeniable is that programmatic advertising was the reason for their rise.
Programmatic advertising is, indeed, a great tool. Companies big and small can easily and cheaply reach millions of consumers. While it’s effectiveness isn’t always clear, it’s ability to be targeted and measured is an attractive answer because of its relatively small cost compared to other media like television.
What has become clear, though, is that its cost is much higher than we had ever imagined. Since the election, it has become evident that inflammatory sites like Breitbart.com have gamed the system, running up to a dozen ad servers on their sites at a time. This has allowed them to print incendiary, sexist and xenophobic content without any blowback from advertisers. Why? Because advertisers had no idea that they were on the site to begin with.
Since we began our campaign in November, 2016, we have notified hundreds of companies that they were advertising on Breitbart.com. Most didn’t know they were there at all and more than 375 immediately chose to remove themselves from the site including companies like Kellogg’s, BMW, Chase, T.D. Ameritrade and T-Mobile. What is troubling is that, because of the convoluted web of programmatic technology, their ads are still appearing on this site even after they have explicitly blocked the site from their media buy. This underscores the fact that programmatic is proving to be, as it stands now, an unreliable, unregulated and irresponsible way to reach consumers. So the question remains whether it is worth the cost to to brands to use it.
Companies must now weigh their interest in clicks and impressions that may or may not yield results with the certainty that they will be, very literally, supporting content that alienates everyone from women to minorities to immigrants with their ad dollars.
For an industry that typically does not like to take a side, advertisers must now look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves if they are more interested in eyeballs or standing against the xenophobia that threatens to tear our country’s moral fabric. Like it or not, this time in history requires them to choose.
