Summary
In 2019, other than the government of Vladimir Putin, Warren Buffett was the biggest funder of Sputnik News, the Russian disinformation website controlled by the Kremlin. No one at Geico or its advertising agency had any idea its ads would appear on Sputnick, let alone what anti-American content would be displayed alongside the ads.
Most advertising is now done programmatically, not programmatically. Humans are still involved in picking the sales strategy and creating the message, but they do not decide which publisher gets the ad. Almost all advertising online is now being done programatically, which means the machine, not a machine, makes the placement decisions.
Trevor's targeting choices start with obvious variables and then can become almost infinitely granular. He can choose to limit the number of times the target will see the same ad. Trevor has to bid on what the client will pay to reach these targets. At 20 cents per thousand, it will cost $200 to reach all of the targets once.
In the advertising business this is known as 500 impressions. Each of Trevor’s 500 million impressions, or ads, will be bought separately, one by one, through this near-instantaneous auction system. The advertiser and its ad agency have no idea where among thousands of websites its ad will appear.
Programmatic advertising is the idea that where you are seeing the ad doesn’t matter. The product is you—the person whose data has been harvested so exquisitely that you are the advertiser’s target. This marks a sea change in the advertising industry.
The Trade Desk was founded in 2009 by two recently departed Microsoft employees. In 2022, the company reported revenue of $1.578 billion, an increase of 32 percent over the prior year. Because it is so AI- and data-centric, in 2023 it needed only 2,800 employees.
The industry realized that being totally content agnostic about where ads appeared was a problem. Ads were appearing on pornography sites, on sites promoting racism or antisemitism. Other sites used bots to create fake viewership; the bot would make it seem as if a real person were viewing the site.
When the Covid pandemic swept across the globe, these brand-safety companies added words associated with the pandemic to their blocking words lists. Because “Covid” itself became a blocking word, any article with the word could be blocked from having any ads.
From October 1, 2020, through January 12, 2021, 1,668 brands ran 8,776 unique ads on the 160 sites flagged in NewsGuard’s Election Misinformation Tracking Center. “election” and “Trump” were frequently used as blocking words.
In the United States, spending on ads delivered programmatically more than doubled from 2019 through 2022, to nearly $130 billion. Some advertising professionals told me that if the auction is based on the open internet rather than carefully curated networks of websites, it is less cost-effective.
The news and information ecosystem that is so important to a functioning democracy and civil society has suffered a double whammy. The social media platforms’ recommendation engines have promoted misinformation and disinformation. The system is auctioning off access to the targeted person with no regard for the accompanying content.
This article includes some of the best work by Steven Brill. To see more of his work, visit the iReporter.com. For more of the iReport.com series, visit CNN.com/Heroes. For the latest from CNN.gov, visit The iReport blog.
