Presidents’ Day Clean Up!
It’s Presidents’ Day weekend here in the United States. This weekend, that falls on the third Monday of February marks the birthday celebration of America’s first President, George Washington. Another usual occurrence on Presidents’ Day weekend is the emergence of the first ‘retail sale’ of the year. For most consumer brands, it has been pretty quiet since Christmas — on both the sales front, and the advertising front.
In the eight years that I spent leading the Publisher Platforms business lines at Oath, AOL, and Millennial Media, Presidents’ Day was always a welcomed weekend. Year after year, we would answer the same question in the early days of January — “Where are the advertisers? When will advertiser spend accelerate?” With many consumers getting new devices over the holiday season, supply would always hit all time highs in January — while demand would lag behind significantly. You see, after an aggressive Q4 spending budgets at year end, most brand advertisers would go into hibernation in January. This was generally the time where advertisers would build their plans for the upcoming year, and get budgets approved. And our answer to the “where are the advertisers” question was generally responded with — “just wait until Presidents’ Day weekend…that is when the brands come back to life!”.
Six weeks ago I embarked on a new journey as CEO of Clean Creative. Our mission is to provide effective and robust solutions that protect publishers, advertisers, and consumers from threats against the free and open internet. This weekend, our team and our technology was in overdrive protecting publishers around the world from the various forms of malware and redirects. Our customers were safe, but the internet was quite a crazy place the last 48 hours.
Just take a look at any of the Comscore Top 250 sites today and you will see that brand spending is alive and well this Presidents’ Day weekend. Campaigns from brands like Audi, H&R Block, Dodge, and TurboTax are taking on a heavy presence at the sites in which I personally frequent. And while the regular advertisers seem to have their eyes set on grabbing their unfair share of the newfound cash that consumers possess at tax refund time, a whole new class of advertisers seems to have their budgets approved accordingly as well — Malvertisers.
Starting on Saturday this weekend, there was a significant influx of Malvertisers that were set on doing damage to the ecosystem by disrupting users, destroying publisher monetization, and in-turn preventing these brand advertiser dollars from reaching consumers eyeballs. Chances are, if you used your mobile phone on the internet this weekend, you too were impacted.
It goes a little something like this: First, you pop open ESPN.com to see how Tiger is doing at Riviera this fine Sunday afternoon (spoiler alert: he was even through 13). You click through to the story, and just as you are scrolling on the screen reading— something unexpected happens and up pops this screen:
You didn’t accidentally click something — it just happened. The bad news — you didn’t get to see how Tiger did, and chances are you won’t be able to find your way back to ESPN as your phone went into an endless loop of navigation events to get to this page. Chances are you won’t win a gift card either. And no, this wasn’t an Amazon.com ad. Plain and simply, it is a scam. For the end user, the experience is hideous. For other advertisers on the original page, their ads were unable to be clicked on or have users engage with them. And for the publisher, in this case ESPN, this was devastating. Creating great content is really hard. Delighting users is really hard. Making money from those users is even more difficult. In this instance, everything went wrong for everyone. A disaster.
ESPN.com wasn’t alone this weekend. Plenty of the biggest and best sites on the internet were plagued with these challenging user experiences and revenue destruction. Plenty of advertisers bought ads that were not seen by users. And while I spent the last 8 years of my career playing defense against these nefarious characters, I couldn’t be more excited to now be playing offense in my new role leading Clean Creative to be the company that the most trusted brands on the internet partner with to preserve their user experiences and monetization.
Why did it happen? Why on a holiday weekend? What could have been done to prevent it? How do we protect the free and open internet from these folks that are doing everything in their power to destroy it? Join the team from Clean Creative for a webinar on Thursday February 21 at 3pm EST where we will explain exactly what occurred, how it is even possible, and what you can do to prevent it from happening in the future. Click here to save your spot.
The free and open internet is under attack, and we are here to help! Let’s hope Sunday night is a little quieter than the last two…