How to not have your brand end up 'on the asshole of the internet.'

A discussion with the co-founders of CheckMyAds

Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin want to make the marketing world a better place. It’s a tough task, given the realities of a system that has wrested brand stewardship away from the brand. The duo is optimistic that their approach, through their consultancy CheckMyAds, can help companies not only navigate the rough waters of brand safety, but arm them with the appropriate blueprints and language to make active decisions as to how and where their brand shows up.

Their goal is admirable. There are a lot of gray areas when it comes to brand safety, and their bet is to help brands recognize it’s not just about an ad ending up on a bad site, but the whole kit-and-caboodle of brand reputation management. They also have a newsletter, Branded, to help marketers.

Jammi was a co-founder of Sleeping Giants and Atkin was a freelance marketer before joining forces. Below is an edited (though still lengthy; about a 10-minute read) but important conversation the three of us had around CheckMyAds, how companies can take actual steps in changing the conversation around brand safety, and where we go next.

(Claire Atkin, left, and Nandini Jamii, right; image via CheckMyAds)

Your goal is to understand what brand safety is. How are you defining brand safety?

Nandini: My understanding of brand safety is the result of actually causing brand safety crises for companies at Sleeping Giants. They don’t come from a stray ad placement on an uncomfortable website, or even the news. They come from actively supporting or funding bad actors, or bad-faith publishers. But they also come from other places. They come from your political campaign contributions, or your investments, the way you treat your employees, the clients you take on. 

Hootsuite had a brand safety crisis when they took on ICE as a client. Ad-tech industry defines brand safety as too narrow. The term I use is “answerability”: it’s your ability to justify what you distribute, what you amplify, what you enable and what you monetize. 

Claire: Answerability is the lens at which we look at brand safety. And what we’ve seen looking at brand safety is that the way it’s been explained to marketers from the ad-tech industry doesn’t make any sense at all. What they say is: you don't want to be next to uncomfortable discussions or negative sentiment content or emerging negative news. None of that is going to lead to a brand safety crisis; none of that will make people think less of your brand if you’re on a trusted news provider. It just doesn’t make any sense. They’re using a brand safety crisis as a boogeyman to sell brand safety technology. 

There’s a difference between brand safety and brand accountability. It’s a multifaceted issue.

Claire: Right now, brand safety crises are happening more and more; not just because we’re more online or more enraged thanks to Twitter and Facebook, but it’s also because we’re living at a time when it’s easier than ever to see injustice, to draw lines between cause and effect of corporate decisions, and we live in a place where there is a vacuum of justice. All these big reactions from the public are happening because the public is not seeing proper regulation and proper enforcement. When you have a vacuum within content moderation policies, and this goes up from tech level to federal level, you're going to get a whiplash effect from the public. 

This is all very philosophical. How do you translate this conversation to actionability for companies who, for so long, haven’t cared.

Claire: When we’re in these board rooms, we’re talking to VPs of marketing or the person owning the brand. And they’re saying, ‘where are we on the internet?’ 

Someone said, ‘oh my god, our ads are on the asshole of the internet.’ They were horrified.

These are brands who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to monitor the sentiment of their brand within the public sphere. They really care about brand equity. For them to see what kind of websites they’re on, some of these websites are blocked by internal servers; they say, ‘we had no idea! This has to stop immediately.’ As soon as they notice, it’s tangible. That’s where you start to make it actionable. 

Once they are horrified, what comes next? How does the person responsible for their brand, knowing it’s a game of whack-a-mole, move forward? 

Claire: Whoever’s in charge of the brand, they tell ad execs or the media buyer to block certain websites, or create an inclusion list. And whatever they do, they get pushback because they don’t want to mess with KPIs of the campaign. It’s our job to make a business case for brand safety.  

There are a number of case studies that prove our point for us that having a stricture inclusion list might increase CPMs but overall, it also increases the efficiency and performance of the campaign. If you’re focusing on the weeds, the smaller KPIs, you might not see a financial benefit. But if you’re looking at campaign budget from a bird’s-eye view, it’s obvious that brand safety is the right thing to do. 

I think about the phrase ‘your reputation precedes you.’ Should brands think about their reputation the same way? Why wouldn’t you look at all the things that affect your reputation and not do something about it?

Claire: It’s so obvious, when you think about it. The fact is they’re focused on other things. We talk about: Keyword blocking doesn’t work, how can you as individuals go through your ads and check them for what’s most dangerous? What are symbols of hate speech or dog whistles? We talk about those, and once we get the tip of the iceberg out of the way, then we can talk about brand suitability.

Nandini: Marketers are not disinformation experts. If you asked me four years ago, if you gave me the task of identifying and removing misinformation from a media buy I wouldn’t know where to start.

Claire: We run training on how to do that. So when they have to be answerable to media buyers or the public—why did you block this website—they have the vocabulary and are armed with the right language to make clear decisions.

What’s some of that vocabulary?

Claire: Our slogan talks about hate speech and disinformation. Neither is useful when you're communicating a decision you made. Instead, we suggest having specific language why something is dangerous or not dangerous. 

For instance, if a website uses conspiracy theories about coronavirus to spread myths about why the Chinese communist party is a danger to America, and if they’re using covid to whip up racism, then we can talk about racism or covid 19 disinfo. Instead of an umbrella term, we talk about very specific things. 

Nandini: One other example: we reframe the conversation from left vs right, which is how a lot of marketers think in terms of media bias charts. These are not helpful indicators; we tell them to leave behind right versus left and think in terms of information vs propaganda. We know signs of propaganda, like obscuring ownership or creating narratives that villainizes a certain group.

Claire: Once they move away from that that frees them from this belief that they have to balance out these decisions. It’s where they feel paralyzed. They feel like they’re being biased in their decisions, and maybe blocking more publications on the right versus the left. And this gives them a better framework to think about how it doesn’t matter if it’s right or left, it’s accuracy vs disinformation. 

What’s some of the worst you’ve seen?

Nandini: Gateway Pundit. It’s such an obvious one, and everyone knows what it is. It’s messed up that the ad-tech providers dropped Breitbart but kept the Gateway Pundit. That shouldn’t have been there. On some level I can excuse some more obscure media outlets, but this is a well-documented disinformation site.

Claire: We’ve both seen horrid and abhorrent content, but the things most dangerous are the things people are spending the most information on. When we help folks check their ads, we organize the URLs by how much the campaign has spent within the last month. Gateway Pundit is a fear mongering disinfo outlet that is full of racism and bigotry and especially dangerous because people are spending so much money on it. Whereas some of the blogs are even  scarier, but might not get as much budget. 

Who’s approaching this arena the best? Which brands are taking brand safety, accountability, answerability, the most serious?

Claire: P&G are the best and most thoughtful advertisers because they have the most impact. And seem to be taking it the most seriously. Fortune 500 companies are the ones leading the brand safety renaissance, waking up to the fact we can’t automate our way to brand safety.

Nandini: The brands invested in their marketing and brand equity are at the forefront of brand safety. They have the most to protect, which means they have the most to lose.

Lancome has been appearing on every disinformation site. It’s striking to see such a premium brand on absolute garbage websites. 

Is this a buyer problem? That the brand has pushed this responsibility onto its media agency? How much of this is a culpability problem from the media agency of not having the proper mechanisms in place?

Claire: We hear that a lot. The fact is blaming down the chain isn't that useful. Marketers have to take responsibility for what's happening and that’s why we work with marketers. We are interested in how to communicate what is and not appropriate to those agencies. It has to be up to marketers to take back responsibility, and to be crystal clear about how they expect to operationalize their brand values within the media buy.

What’s your advice to brands working with ad-tech companies, and ad-tech companies trying to dig themselves out of this hole they created?

Claire: First thing we’re doing is building guidelines for and with brands. One thing that’s underlying your questions: There’s sort of a befuddlement at the incompetency of it all. What’s important to remember: in order to work at these brands, in order to be sustainably the best within the industry, your team has to be enormously competent. There’s a culture where you don’t want to mess up. And we’re sensitive to that. 

When we work with brands, we make sure we're not coming in and saying ‘these guys messed up and we have to fix it.’ We say, ‘This is an industry-wide challenge. We’re working with partners in order to improve it over time. It’s a process. It’s not obvious. And this is how you can work with your supply chain to improve the situation.’

If we go in there and point fingers, it’s not productive. 

Agencies can be transparent about how the system has and hasn’t been working for them, and work with brands and ad-tech companies to raise the alarm before the brands do. 

Nandini: Ultimately the ad-tech ecosystem has failed brands. They don’t have the tools they need to meet their business goals. We hope that this accelerates change. 

Does your activism hurt?

Nandini: It hasn't yet. It’s clear to brands that what we’re doing is advocating for them. I stopped calling out brands last year. I realized calling them out wasn’t productive. And the people we need to hold accountable are the ad-tech vendors. 

I exclusively focus on holding those people accountable because they’re responsible for the ad spend of thousands of brands. So when I get Pubmatic to drop the National Pulse* like I did last weekend or if I get 3 exchanges to drop Gateway Pundit as I did over the summer, that’s ultimately brand safety advocacy. 

We’re on the side of marketers. We advocate for marketers. We want them to have a safer place to advertise in and all the advocacy I do now is focused on making that happen. Some of the work we do is to help and encourage advertisers to think beyond the system we have today. To give them the courage to imagine a new system, a new way of doing marketing with a new set KPIs that don't focus on vanity metrics that focus on clicks or conversions but instead long term brand equity, or brand awareness or reputation, attention, recall. These are the things vanity metrics don't give you. 

And that requires longer term value of your brand into consideration. That’s what we lost in this system. Our long term goal is to reimagine the advertising ecosystem in a way to serve the brand and not the ad-tech bottom line.

*Correction: Due to an editing error, an original version of this referenced The National Post, when it should have been The National Pulse.

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Phish, “I Didn’t Know”

Some interesting links:

For platforms: 

• Twitter launches 24-hour Fleets to make tweeting less ‘terrifying’ (Venture Beat)

• Facebook Rejected Employee Push to Throttle Misleading Political Posts (The Information)

• Facebook Has A Rule To Stop Calls To Arms. Moderators Didn't Enforce It Ahead Of The Kenosha Shootings. (BuzzFeed)

For retail:

• Amazon starts selling prescription drugs, with two-day delivery for Prime members (Vox)

• Covid Lockdown Shopping Habits Are Hard to Break (Bloomberg)

For media criticism:

• A Popular Political Site Made a Sharp Right Turn. What Steered It? (NYT)

For news product research:

• The State of the News Product Community 2020 (Texas State University)

For newsletters:

• Outbrain leaders launch newsletter curation app (Axios)

For streaming:

• Hulu Raises the Price of Its Live-TV Service by $10, or 18% (Bloomberg)