How online ads end up near offensive content
Programmatic advertising is an automatic, softwaredriven system for advertisers to pay in advance for ads to run across online content.
A growing number of advertisers have recently pulled their advertising business from Google’s video service YouTube after their ads ran with offensive and extremist content.
But how did those ads even wind up near such content? The answer: programmatic advertising.
Programmatic advertising is an automatic, software-driven system for advertisers to pay in advance for ads to run across online content including social media, websites and video on computers and portable devices.
Much of the $83 billion that research firm eMarketer expects to be spent on U.S. digital ads this year — more than is spent on TV or any other media — is executed via programmatic.
“Everything is done instantaneously, billing and transactions are done in milliseconds across a massive ecosystem, and trillions of impressions are delivered,” said Chris Loretto, executive vice president at Digital First Media, which participates in programmatic ad sales across the sites and apps of its 106 newspapers including The Denver Post and San
Jose Mercury News. DFM also has Adtaxi, a digital marketing agency, that buys programmatic ads as well as delivers ads across search, social and email. HOW DOES PROGRAMMATIC ADVERTISING WORK? Think of the system as akin to computerized trading on the stock market: It happens in milliseconds. In traditional advertising, a company looking to run ads chooses a particular network TV show or time block, or newspaper or magazine. With programmatic advertising, a digital advertiser can tweak delivery of its ads to certain consumer demographics (age, sex, location), behaviors and other characteristics. “So this technology takes all the data and automates it, matching the buyer and the seller at prices that everybody is agreeable” with, Loretto said. HOW DOES AN AD WIND UP NEAR HATEFUL CONTENT? Sometimes the customer demographics overlap with online content that can be offensive, and a programmatic ad will be delivered to such a site. “Right now, with all the algorithms they cannot guarantee to an advertiser that their ads won’t be on some kind of site that is problematic,” said Miro Copic, a marketing expert at San Diego State University and co-founder of BottomLine Marketing. HOW CAN THEY FIX IT? YouTube is working on the problem; it and other sites have technicians manually monitoring video content to prevent problem matchups. But even as the boycott grows daily, its automated system continued to place ads from major brands, which has led to more companies including Coca-Cola, GM and Starbucks to pull ads from YouTube, The Wall
Street Journal reported Friday. Part of the problem? YouTube is a network that showcases usergenerated content, so the volume grows infinitely. When someone reports a problem, that video or content can be flagged and will not have specific ads displayed. “In the short term, it can be a very manual process,” Copic said.
The major players in the growing digital ad industry are “very focused around improving the ad ecosystem,” Digital First’s Loretto said. “But it’s not an easy answer to what might seem like an easy question.” WHO WINS? Eventually, consumers will win because better ad delivery mechanisms will be developed. In the short term, competitors to Google and Facebook could have an opening to gain some digital ad sales. Yahoo, which delivers ads via search, mobile and video, or Microsoft, which offers search ads through its Bing network, “can go to those guys and say, ‘Look, we can provide you more reliable targeting and even guarantee the audience,’ ” Copic said. “So it provides an opportunity for the other players.” POSSIBLE LOSERS? Google’s YouTube and Facebook have the most to lose. Google is tops in digital ad revenue, due to attract nearly 41% of all spending this year. Coming in at No. 2 is Facebook, expected to generate $16.3 billion, compared to the $33 billion Google is expected to get.