Drip Sequence💧

In case you missed it:

I sent out a report detailing the comp survey, if you missed the first newsletter the URL for the LookerBI Dashboard can be found right here.

Headline Overviews

• Forbes accused of selling MFA media to brands under guise of legitimate ad space The Drum's report exposes Forbes for allegedly selling ad space on a spammy subdomain, www3.forbes.com, to major brands like Microsoft, Disney, Ford, and Johnson & Johnson. Adalytics' investigation reveals that advertisers were misled into thinking they were purchasing premium inventory on Forbes' main site, while their ads were actually placed on a subdomain with excessive ad impressions and low-quality content. Forbes has shut down the subdomain following inquiries, and the blame is directed at adtech firm Media.net for the misleading transactions. Adalytics' findings highlight broader issues of ad fraud and poor media quality in the industry.

• Internet Activity Plummeted As People Went Outside to Watch Solar Eclipse During the recent total solar eclipse, internet activity notably decreased across North America, particularly in states along the eclipse's path like Vermont, Arkansas, Indiana, Maine, New Hampshire, and Ohio. Even states where the eclipse was partial, like Massachusetts and Kansas, saw significant drops in internet usage. However, not all areas experienced this dip; some states unaffected by the eclipse showed no change in internet traffic

• Meta Advertisers Say Automated System Has Been Glitchy for Weeks Meta's automated advertising system for Facebook and Instagram has experienced significant issues in recent months. The system's performance has declined, leading to higher campaign costs, mixed results, and reduced sales. Despite these problems, Meta has not provided a formal explanation. Might want to check on your report month-over-month.

Sounding Off on the Forbes MFA Debacle

As most of you are aware (shout out to Kendra Barnett for the amazing article on The Drum), Forbes has been under fire for utilizing your ad spend and instead of running it on a nice crisp clean placement on their main site, they crammed it onto their www3 subdomain on hundreds of little rectangles all over the site that makes Buzzfeed look like an ad-free experience. If you are wondering what it looks like, it looks like shit.

This problem compounds the existing issues with transparency and accountability when it comes to the integrity behind paid digital media placements.

One anon user DM’d me “It could be a significant domino in the death spiral of open web display programmatic. It is last on the plan, so does it need to be there at all anymore?” This sentiment reflects a growing skepticism among a lot of you regarding the efficacy of programmatic advertising.

Besides growing skepticism, there is undeniable frustration that some of you have shared.

“Never ran it. Never passed our vetting process. Best believe I’m scrutinizing URL reports again.”

“I can only speak for my client but we are paused indefinitely while we investigate and won't be issuing new IOs. We have strict verbiage in our standards and IOs that we don't run on MFAs so client not thrilled at Forbes about this”

Further compounding the issue is the apparent failure of ad verification systems to detect the subdomain's questionable practices. “Lol even if you check them, it won’t say shit. Ad verification didn’t pick it up forever. You need log level reports, from EVERYWHERE.”

Adalytics has published a whole report on this and they mentioned this “Forbes’ website appears to be set up to automatically redirect users who try to open www3.forbes.com to www.forbes.com, preventing the user from reviewing the content on the www3. subdomain unless they input an exact page URL or first click on an Outbrain ad on another website that redirects them to the www3 subdomain.”

If you are still auditing this and need more screenshots and detailed reports, you can find the full report for free from Adalytics right here.

March Chadness Update

I started this on the third week of March to see what org would “win” and unfortunately so many of you were laid off in the last 18 months that Unemployed won the whole thing.

Honestly, I think this whole thing has been the most hilarious experience that I’ve had running @digital_chadvertising, and next year I want to set this up properly so that a real organization can legitimately win and also not have agencies spar off against their own holding company.

While the whole thing was just shits and giggles and internet clout, it does say a lot about your cohesion and relationship amongst each other at your org when you and your colleagues are willing to rally (even internationally) to brigade my Instagram story and vote for March Chadness. So while Unemployed has won the whole thing, I would like to give an honorable mention to the employees at the following orgs: PMG, Wpromote, StackAdapt, Big Happy, and The Trade Desk. Not only are your employees awesome for rallying each other up for this, but there were a fair amount of DMs I received from people who were simply voting for you org because they liked working with you as a vendor/partner/client.

M&A News

• Hootsuite to acquire Talkwalker 4/8/2024

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