USA Today Owner Gave Advertisers Inaccurate Information for Nine Months

wsj.com

12 points·donohoe··3 comments

> Among the major brands that purchased ad space that was labeled incorrectly in auctions were Sears, Nike, Adidas, Ford, State Farm, Starbucks, Kia and Marriott. Representatives for those advertisers didn’t respond to requests for comment.

> “Programmatic advertising relies on a lot of data being self-reported by those selling the ads,” Mr. Vickers said. “That this issue went undetected for so long suggests that the processes in place to verify this information are not sufficient.”

Why the fuck are we collecting all of this personal information on users of the web to "improve ad targeting" when it appears that the industry as a whole is grossly incompetent at measuring the efficacy of their advertising campaigns?

I keep waiting for the online advertising bubble to pop, because there's so much about it that doesn't make any sense to me--selling washing machines to people who just bought one, placing a tacky and irritating autoplay ad for your premium brand right next to "one weird trick" stuff, demographic microtargeting that seems to miss its mark regularly, clicks being great unless they're on purpose because then it's fraud. But that all must not matter too much, because everyone keeps doing it.

> The discrepancies in Gannett’s ad auctions were discovered by Braedon Vickers, an independent ad industry researcher. He worked with Adalytics, a firm that helps brands analyze where their ads appear, to study the issue.

So you have to pay someone to figure out how to place the ads, then hire someone else to ensure they were placed appropriately.

What a shitshow.

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