The time Mumbrella accidentally funded Breitbart
After being informed Mumbrella’s ads were appearing on Breitbart, Mumbrella’s Josie Tutty looks into how and why we had ended up on the alt-right site, and asks where we should draw the line.
Early yesterday morning, the Mumbrella News Twitter account received a message informing us that an ad for our upcoming Finance Marketing Summit was displaying on alt-right aligned, climate change denying, openly misogynistic US publication Breitbart.
UH OH!!! @mumbrella + @Mumbrellanews your ads are on Alt Right hate site Breitbart ☹️
Please dont fund hate speech with your ad $$s Please Block Breitbart from your ad buy@slpng_giants_oz @slpng_giants pic.twitter.com/6ZHVfkPAvt
— Slow Burn (@SlowBurnOz) 26 April 2018
A chat with our marketing team revealed that we were, indeed, funding the site – a whole 93c had been safely delivered to the hands of the people who’ve run headlines including: “Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy”, “Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?” and “There’s no hiring bias against women in tech, they just suck at interviews”.
To get a feel for the site’s content, let’s take a look at a few lines from the first title of the bunch, written by controversial provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos:
Women on the Pill don’t look right and don’t talk right. What could be worse? Well, they can’t jiggle correctly either.
Did you know that cellulite didn’t exist before the Pill?
Birth control makes you a slut.
All in all, not exactly brand safety 101.
A quick look at our AdWords account revealed that a single user had visited Breitbart, seen the ad, and clicked on it. Google charged us $1.37.
After taking its 22% share, the remainder of the cash was sent to Breitbart.
The tweet to Mumbrella was sent by an activist acting on behalf of Sleeping Giants, an online campaign “to make bigotry and sexism less profitable” by informing advertisers that their ads are appearing on sites such as Breitbart.
Sleeping Giants asks its followers to visit the offending site, take a screenshot of any ads that appear, and tweet it to the advertiser with “a polite note” asking them to remove their spend.
How to be a Giant:
1) look on Breitbart & take a screenshot of an ad
2) tweet it to the advertiser with a polite note
3) tag @slpng_giants— Sleeping Giants (@slpng_giants) 27 November 2016
At the time of writing, 3,788 advertisers have pulled their spend from Breitbart. According to Sleeping Giants, 125 of those are Australian companies.
The Sydney Writers Festival was also called out by the same user for its Breitbart ads.
A major arts festival lining the pockets of an alt-right hate site would have been big news in any world outside of the programatically-challenged one we currently live in.
EEEK!!! @SydWritersFest your ads are on Alt Right hate site Breitbart ☹️
Please dont fund hate speech with your ad $$s Please Block Breitbart from your ad buy@slpng_giants_oz @slpng_giants pic.twitter.com/EWuwhnFHpr
— Slow Burn (@SlowBurnOz) 25 April 2018
WOW! Looking at the calibre of the writers on https://t.co/68MMGrfQW8 for the @SydWritersFest I’m pretty sure they would not be impressed seeing advertising for this festival on Breitbart? #BetterFixThatASAP https://t.co/sknalXULzX
— Noely (@YaThinkN) 26 April 2018
Because here’s the thing – we didn’t choose to have our ad appear on Breitbart. The reason why our ad appeared was down to the magical art of Google’s affinity audiences.
For some reason, Google decided that whoever was scrolling through Breitbart was probably also the kind of person who was interested in our Finance Marketing Summit.
Or perhaps Google knows something we don’t.
So why don’t we simply blacklist offending sites?
Well, we did, once we’d been made aware of it. If you want to do the same, Sleeping Giants have a handy how-to guide.
But here’s the problem: where do we draw the line?
When the news of Don Burke’s alleged history of abuse broke, we blocked the Burke’s Backyard site. But do we also block Louis CK’s site? What about Craig McLachlan?
And even if we did decide where we stood on the alt-right to Vice spectrum, new sites are popping up every day, all over the world. And Google is placing our ads on them.
During Mumbrella’s history of Google display campaigns, we’ve placed our ads on 75,463 different sites, resulting in more than 15 million impressions.
The Finance Marketing Summit campaign – the one which appeared on Breitbart – has been running for about one month and has already appeared on 565 different sites.
There are so many ads being created every day, that trawing through the entire list of sites would be enough work for a full-time member of staff. We’re not about to hire that person anytime soon – and neither, I would imagine, are the majority of other advertisers.
My chat with marketing revealed we already exclude any sites or apps that are deemed to be:
- Sensational and shocking
- Sexually suggestive
- Gambling
- In-game ads
Sure, we could start checking every box on the list, including ‘sensitive social issues’, ‘tragedy and conflict’, and ‘profanity and rough language’.
But if we ticked every possible box, our ads would have nowhere left to go. Even this very site doesn’t tick the profanity-free box. What a shit fit.
So where can we go from here?
Short of giving up on your online marketing strategy entirely, there are a few small things you can do.
First, if someone informs you that your ad is appearing somewhere you’d rather it wasn’t, take them seriously. Not only could you be putting your hard-earned money in unsavoury publisher’s hands, but you’re creating a serious brand safety risk.
Keep your blacklist up to date, and don’t neglect to take a look every now and again at where your money’s going.
Checking sporadically when you’ve got time is better than never checking.
It’s your money, after all.
But ultimately, the Breitbarts of the world will continue to pop into existence faster than we can blacklist them, and deciding which sites we feel are hate-filled enough to warrant being blacklisted is more work than we can afford.
I’m sure there’s many advertisers that feel the same.
If all you’ve read are those Breitbart headlines and not the articles that follow, then you’re truly ignorant and not accepting of other opinions. Naturally those headlines are designed to shock – hello marketers out there, have you not heard of click bait?! Why is it okay for leftist publications to shock all they want without the same standard applied? Whilst they are right they are not alt right, go and check your facts…you are wrong! Fed up with this Orwellian indoctrination.
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So your excuse is basically “because Google”. You tell us there is NO way of running ads on the platform that allows you to be 100% sure you are not funding hate speech. I don’t disagree!
Then here’s a thought. Maybe a better option for Mumbrella would be to stop using the guaranteed-to-fund-hate-speech (also tax dodging and monopoly exploiting, but that’s for another article…) Google advertising platform.
You’d also be working your own self interest in another – possibly far more important – way. There won’t be many people left in media and marketing to read your fantastic website if we all give our marketing budgets to Google.
Come on Mumbrella. Do the right thing.
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Breitbart is what people who are in the real media industry would call an enivornmental buy for Mumbrella as you both specialise ina spewing out diarrhea. Its on brand
Had this happen to any other piblisher, you would be screaming blue murder.
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…or the fact that you only served one impression, with a click – would mean that SlowBurn OZ would have to be that impression, else how did they get that screenshot!!
So are the people ‘watching out’ for these things actually part of the problem?
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People who visit Breitbart have made a conscious decision to visit that website, and people who don’t like it should just stay away. And believe it or not, there are some alt-right Australian marketers out there – do you not want to sell tickets to them?
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Wow… Who’d have thought a pretty generic filler piece about Ad Safety would have engendered such a strong response from the great unwashed as the comments posted so far.. Breitbart, Google and Programatic must be the hot button topics for today… Perhaps it was these commenters who gave you your Affinity Audience by having Milo open in one tab and Mumbrella on the other…
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Don’t give in to the mob. Breitbart is just undergrad edgy humour designed to annoy Left wing ideologues. You may not like it, but they’re basically saying the same stuff as The Australian in a more provocative way
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It’s perfectly fine for ‘Rightist’ sites to be shocking, but guess what – no one HAS to listen to anything they aren’t interested in or don’t care for. Mumbrella is under no obligation to support sites like Breitbart. If this upsets you, you can always pay for ad space there yourself to complain about it, free speech and all…
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Well done on completely missing the point of the article.
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Well said! This Leftist totalitarian intolerance for opinions they don’t agree with, is increasingly toxic. What is wrong with hearing an opinion that dissents from the mainstream? Disagree, debate – but don’t seek to silence. This is why Trump won, and will again in 2020.
Will the stubble-faced hipsters never learn from their rejection and defeat?
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Should have known that this article about how Google ads work would turn into rants from people defending Breitbart. But to stay on topic, I think the problem really is Google’s, not yours. We’ve seen it on YouTube and we see it with Google Ads. Google needs to be more vigilant on which sites/topics are allowed to carry its ads. And conversely, it also needs to be more vigilant on what ads it carries. I was recently on an article on the SMH and received an ad that said “F–k all night” with an animation of a penis. It was reminiscent of those spam emails that used to be around in the early 2000s – ie, a scam. I hardly think it would meet the standards of the publisher or of Google, yet there it was.
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Probably just read the headline…
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Isn’t is more of a risk to Breitbart that ‘libtards’ can use google advertising to breach the filter bubble and reach their audience?
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Wow, for a media news publication the ignorance is astonishing… How is Breitbart alt-right? I’m sick of this left wing bias, time to play by their rules… Boycott Mumbrella!!!
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Ignorantly Blissful post.
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Were you looking in the mirror when you made that post?
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Do you have a media agency?
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Good advertisers use a white list nowadays as opposed to the difficult task of updating a blacklist.
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Breitbart is the epitome and the mouth piece of the Alt-Right. If you don’t think this content is ultra right wing I dread to imagine your political sensibilities. Ah the ‘free speech’ argument. Textbook Alt-Right techniques.
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In your list of things to do, how about building some trust with your reader/users? Ask them to flag egregious ad placements, state how you’ll respond to their flags, regularly tell them what you’ve done in response and thank them for keeping Mumbrella ethical. You’ve got a community – so use it!
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“openly misogynistic” too, apparently.
Typical left-wing take on anything that doesn’t align 100% with their own beliefs. It’s actually called bigotry.
What an ignorant writer, is our Josie.
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Breitbart is no more alt-right than SMH or The Age is alt-left.
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So you don’t run adds on sexually suggestive apps. But what about sexually explicit ones? (language is fun)
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There is so much not to like about Breitbart…
https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism?utm_term=.smx30nJ4w#.xl2YyoKWA
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@Robbo.
Errrrrm, no.
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@Jeff
Smart marketeers do not post ad’s to radio, certainly not shock jocks and live TV, certainly being extremely wary of the commercial channels and Foxtel. Very dangerous with the risk of funding hate with live TV and radio.
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Robbo. You are male. You are angry about the world. Get out and about, talk to your neighbours and smile a little !
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I wonder if it’s linked to your ill-judged decision to have that guy from Cambridge Analytica come over…
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What other major targeted ad platforms like Google are there? If they exist on that level, and are committed to not placing ads on hate speech sites (or whatever sites the advertiser doesn’t want their campaign to run on), then I’m sure many would jump at it. As far as I know, Google has the monopoly on online ad placement (excepting Facebook, placing ads on its own platform).
If enough marketers and advertisers tackle Google on their methods, hopefully they improve their site category options to better reflect their user’s needs
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