February 5th-February 11th

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Two retail media acquisitions! Lots more Q4 earnings! But first, a somber wake-up call (yet again) for the industry… 😕😕

U of Digital Will Be Running A Training Workshop At A Live Event For The First Time Ever.

Join Us At Marketecture Live on March 17th For A Fun Session On The Identity Landscape. REGISTER NOW!

Top Stories 👁️ 

How Big Tech's Ad Systems Helped Fund Child Abuse Online
February 7th, 2025
Source: BBC

Summary: Adalytics strikes again. This time, the research firm found that platforms like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are serving ads on websites showing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and adult pornography. The ads were from more than 70 organizations, including MasterCard, Nestlé, Starbucks, Unilever, and the US government. Yikes.

Apparently, Adalytics researcher Krzysztof Franaszek was looking into how US government ads were being served to bots and crawlers when he stumbled upon an image-sharing website where a major advertiser’s digital ads were shown next to sexually explicit images of a child. He reported the website to US and Canadian authorities and documented how it was displaying ads from vendors like Amazon, Google, Criteo, Quantcast, Microsoft, Outbrain, TripleLift, and Zeta Global.

US Senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal fired off letters to the vendors cited in the report to ask questions about how they are vetting websites. Brand safety and verification vendors such as DoubleVerify and IAS are also under fire for this. Media buyers told Digitay that they have received reports from measurement vendors listing the offending websites as “100% brand safe." 🔒

The certification bodies MRC and TAG also received letters asking questions about how they accredit the companies that measure ads on websites that hosted CSAM. Brands and agencies, meanwhile, complained that they often have no idea where their ads are running because the media supply chain is so opaque and complex.

Opinion: What a disgraceful mess. A collective industry failure. Embarassing, shameful, disappointing, you get the point. And there’s plenty of blame to go around. We appreciate Adalytics continuing to shine a light on problems like this so the industry can take immediate action to stop funding abhorrent content through programmatic advertising.

Thanks to Adalytics, and bodies like the ANA, IAB, and others, the industry has made significant progress in the last couple of years towards removing garbage inventory from the ecosystem. MFA sites are being eliminated from the supply chain and SPO initiatives have removed unnecessary middlemen, etc. The mess is being cleaned up, slowly but surely. But what we still don’t talk about enough is how the mess gets started in the first place. If we don’t fix that, we’re always going to be cleaning up messes.

The root cause always traces back to incentives. As long as the industry is economically incentivized in the wrong ways, we will always be cleaning up messes. Here’s a quick rundown of this theory:

1. We still measure media very poorly as an industry.

2. Clicks, views, viewability, engagement, and the like are all flawed proxy metrics for media. And because they are flawed, they can be gamed by bad actors.

3. Companies and people (including those bad actors) get paid based on achieving results according to these flawed metrics.

4. Sure, there’s no exact, ‘right’ answer to measurement, but there are better ways to measure and more thorough ways to gut-check your measurements by triangulating different metrics/methodologies.

5. We don’t care enough collectively, as an industry, to fix this measurement problem. Because, inertia. And because, you know, money.

On one hand, it’s hard to be optimistic because the biggest companies in the industry make money by maintaining the status quo, and many marketers are happy to let it continue because it makes them look good and it makes their lives easier. On the other hand, good folks and companies like Adalytics are calling out the BS more and more, now the government is taking notice, and soon there won’t be anywhere to hide. Hopefully.

The people and companies that figure this out and solve the problem will stand to benefit the most. Be that! Don’t be a willfully ignorant bystander. Or worse, an enabler of the mess.

Paid Subscribers See ALL The Digital Advertising News.

Thank you for reading the U of Digital Newsletter.
Continue reading by upgrading.

That’s It For This Week 👋

The U of Digital Weekly Newsletter is intended for subscribers, but occasional forwarding is okay!

To subscribe visit Uof.Digital/Newsletters or contact us directly for group subscriptions.

And remember, U of Digital helps teams drive better outcomes through structured education on critical topics like programmatic, privacy / identity, CTV, commerce media, AI, and more. Interested in learning more about how we can supercharge your team?