Programmatic advertising has made it frighteningly easy to lose control of where your brand shows up. Because the ad-tech supply chain is so long and opaque, marketers hand placement decisions to third parties and end up funding disinformation and hate sites they've never seen - while wasting money on bot traffic no human ever loads.
Nandini Jammi, who co-founded Check My Ads after the Sleeping Giants campaign, reframes brand safety as a simple question: who do you want to be in business with? Drawing on audits like the headphones retailer that cut its ad spend by 95% with no drop in performance, she shows why checking your placements is both a moral and an economic decision, and how to put in writing what your brand will and won't stand for.
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Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Turing Fest again. We're on day two of week seven. Just a quick recap on what we did earlier in the week in case you missed it. We had with three great chats really, I really enjoyed all of them.
The presentations on the conversations we had Katie Martel talking about workwash marketing, the and the dangers of of, I guess, being disingenuous in that space and the opportunities for, for the good guys as it were. With Elon Montgomery, who's head of UX at kazoo, which is the latest British unicorn, talking about how we move beyond human centered design, really, really thoughtful presentation.
And then Nick Francis, CEO at HelpScout, talked about the his views on purpose driven organizations, and how they the story of how they became a b corp. If you're interested in b corp stuff, actually, by the way, that's really, really worth checking out.
And Nick, Nick's happy to have a chat, you can reach him, he mentions his email in the presentation, etc. So that's all in there. Okay, so on to today. And we're chatting with somebody who a TuringFest alumnus. She was on our stage in Edinburgh last August, August, you know, pre pandemic August, and totally knocked it out of the park.
And has been has had a pretty amazing career over the last few years and all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff. And we'll get into it with her now. So yeah, please welcome Nandini Jami. Nandini Hello. Hey, Brian. It's so good to be with you.
Yeah, you too. You too. Really good to catch up. I got what? You got your cup of tea. Yeah. Peppermint tea. I'm too much coffee, apparently. So so it's been so yeah. We we last saw each other After last year's Turing Fest, I think we were hanging out having burgers and beers and having a chat and talking about what we were both going to be doing in twenty twenty.
And it's it's taken a bit of a different turn. But it's still been a very exciting year for you. So maybe give us a quick recap. Just just the short version, I guess of, of your new venture and what's what you've been up to.
Sure. So Turing Fest was great on so many levels. Thanks for taking a chance on me. It was my first time speaking on Sleeping Giants and it really gave me the opportunity to think about what the significance is of the movement beyond just taking on Breitbart's advertisers.
I also brought my, at that time, she was just sort of a friend that I met on Twitter. She's now my business partner, Claire Atkin. And it was actually at Touring Fest in the days after when we were hanging out and thinking about and talking about, you know, the, the bigger picture problem here and how it is that Sleeping Giants had been, you know, in business, so to speak.
It was a, it's always been an activist campaign and, and, and, and hasn't led to the problem being solved. So, so we managed to, of course, make Breitbart lose, I think, ninety percent of its ad revenues within the first three months of our campaign.
But why hadn't this problem been solved systemically in ad tech? So, you know, yes, you may have blocked Breitbart as a result of our campaign, but there are still thousands of other Breitbart like websites and even worse on the internet that you are still, you're still advertising on.
So Claire and I sort of asked each other, you know, why hasn't this problem been solved? What would it take for it to be solved? And, together we sort of embarked on this journey starting, last year where we just started digging into the ad tech industry to understand like, how does this stuff work?
How does the digital, how does programmatic advertising work? How does the ecosystem work? And we started to sort of understand what the incentives were of this ecosystem. We started to understand the fact that there isn't a whole lot of visibility or transparency for the marketer, for the advertiser to understand where their ads are actually appearing.
And in fact, because the supply chain is so long and so complex, they just, they just kind of give up. They just kind of leave it to someone else to handle. So that means that billions of our dollars collectively are being spent by, you know, by other people.
People who don't represent our brand and who don't really care about our brand at the end of the day, they care about their own bottom lines. So we, we decided, you know, sort of how do we how do we help? How do like where do we fit in all this?
So we ended up starting Check My Ads earlier this year, this summer, as a brand safety consultancy where we help brands understand just like how to check their ads, where to go looking for that information to begin with. And then we help them to draw the line, to think about what it is that they actually want to be, not just where they don't want to be appearing, but also where they do want to be appearing, they, you know, what in the online digital world they want to be
supporting with their ad dollars and give them the ability to put those decisions and put those guidelines into sort of real documented form for the first time to like have a piece of paper or a document that says, this is what we want to stand for.
This is what we do stand for as a brand. And this is how we want to show up in the world online. And these are the rules for our brand. And we expect our vendors and our marketers and everyone who works with us on our marketing plan to to abide by.
So you're you're trying to change the world in in, again, which is pretty impressive. And it's it's I mean, I've I've been watching you work on online. And it's amazing. Like, you're you're the influence that you've had in the past maybe three years, I guess, two, three years, certainly, is incredible.
And it seems like you're really getting good at this. So yeah, and it's great that it's, I suppose it's a good sign that the world's you know, that that a brand safety consultancy is a thing now that's in demand. Whereas, you know, a couple of years ago, probably wouldn't have been.
Maybe maybe we could take a step back to the article that you the the blog post that you posted on medium in back in June, I think. July. Very July was and with a very cool picture of you on the Turing Fest stage, that was I was very happy to see that.
But the article was pretty depressing, a lot of it. And, yeah, it it it called I guess, it you you called out your your cofounder in the Sleeping Giants, and it was all it was all a bit I don't know. It's just kinda ****** to see what you went through.
Maybe maybe not to rehash the article, but the response to it, what was that like? It was, you know, I didn't really know what to expect when I put that article out there. I felt like I needed to do it because I, I needed to establish the fact that I have been influential in this campaign and that I have been a leader.
I feel like that was not really communicated over the years. And that was not just for myself, but, but in order to be able to do the work that I wanted to do to, to work at a, at a higher sort of more impactful level, I needed to have that credibility.
So I put it out there as a way of, of, of claiming my own power. And the, the response was overwhelming. It was overwhelmingly positive. I was not expecting that. I was definitely, I mean, you never know what's going happen when you put something out there like that on the internet.
So I was kind of bracing for the worst or, or just it wouldn't be noticed. The fact that it was noticed, I think was really incredible because it not only said that, you know, people were willing to support me, but I think it sent a message that people were willing to support all, all women, you know, who are going through this.
And I've, I've heard from so many people, just everybody like so many women have, have been through this, the same sort of situation where, you know, they've worked so **** ** something and they don't receive the credit or they're pushed out of their own movements with their own organizations.
And, and I'm really happy to say that I've heard from people who, who took my article and, and decided to go, you know, ask for raises or, you know, claim their own credit. I had a couple of sort of specific things that I outlined in my article that I did in order to take my power back.
And one of them was just taking, taking my own, like taking back control of my own title, you know. I'd never really called myself co founder. I kind of allowed myself to be defined by another narrative. And actually it was at Turing Fest that, that I was sort of officially for the first time referred to as a co founder.
That really made a big impact. So, since then the, the support I've received has given me the confidence to keep going forward. And, and I'm happy to hear that, that other women are also feeling confident to do the same and knowing that they'll have the full support of their peers on social media.
Yeah, it was it was it was amazing to see the the outpouring of support that you got. And even though the there was a lot of, like, the article, I guess, talked about the negative side of what you've been through and what your cofounder put you through.
But, yeah, all of the the the just seemed like so many positives came out of it from you being brave enough to put it out there. Like you say, who knows? The Internet's a weird place and a dark place sometimes. But there was that that you just referred to a thing there where about you being credited as a cofounder and that that that kind of Turing Fest was played a role in that.
I remember that conversation really well with my with my colleague, Marcus. It was on Slack. And he was like, oh, I'm just putting Nandini on the website. What's her job title? Is she co founder? And I was like, yeah. Yeah, of course. And I never thought I never thought it was like a significant thing.
But of course, then it was like, you know, just it was amazing to sort of read afterwards that that that had an impact. So but I guess that was Unknown Yeah, yeah. And I'm delighted that it was, but I'm sort of sad that it that it, you know, kind of took that, that it hadn't, know, you should have been credited from the beginning, of course.
But, you know, you've kind of, you've moved, are you still involved at all with with sleeping giants? Or is that is that all in the past? You know, I I'm providing support to the international accounts. I feel like, I mean, in case you didn't know, the way that Sleeping Giants has always worked is each of the accounts, each of the foreign accounts are all, all operated independently.
So I have in the past supported foreign accounts and I continue to do so. Just whenever they need me, if I can help them in any way I do it. And just, you know, we we move on to sec, but just interested. Did Matt ever reach out to you after the article?
No. Wow. Alright. So so tell me tell me about Check My Ads and the work that you're doing. This so there's two different things that we that we said we should dig into. Brand safety is one side of it. But talk me through the the Ts and Cs part as well.
What are the things that companies should be should be thinking about? Right. So there is just so much to unpack here. You know, I've spent the last few years being an activist publicly on, on social media. But my background is also in marketing and that's sort of my first love.
And what I have sort of been working on is a two pronged effort between one is like, of course, the the advertising side of things. Why is it that, like, how is it that we can solve this problem of of our ads showing up on hate speech at scale without our knowledge?
That's one thing. And the other thing is, you know, I spend if you follow me on Twitter, know this. I spend a lot of time calling out tech companies and tech platforms for for enabling or or monetizing or partnering with hate groups or disinformation peddlers and so on.
And they're really two sides of the same coin, you know, they, it's all a brand safety issue. And the question that it all comes down to is, who do we want to be in business with? And that's something that we no longer know how to answer because of the way that we have scaled our operations.
So from an advertising perspective, we have left it to a third party for so long that when we, you know, when I approached, or, you know, when we're talking to clients about where their ads are showing up and, you know, do you really want to be here?
Their first instinct, their first response is to say, you know, who am I to decide? Who am I to make that decision? And the same goes for tech platforms and, or tech leaders. And, and that question is so absurd to me because, you know, you make, you make decisions like this every day for your brand.
You know, you, if you're in marketing, you've, you know, you make, maybe you've decided what your logo is going to be or what the copy is going to be on your, your marketing, your next marketing campaign or what the colors are going to be or what influencers you're going to work with or, you know, who you're going to, you know, partner with or collaborate with.
Those are all judgment calls that you make every day. It just, it doesn't make sense to me that you would leave your advertising placement decisions. The most important, most critical way that you show up in the world, especially now that we all live online, that you would leave that up to a third party or just a chance or, or just let anybody use your tech platform when ultimately that all reflects on you as a brand.
I think that that fact that we are not comfortable answering that question says a lot about what we have lost in the past, you know, ten, twenty years as we've, we've kind of stepped back from having personal relationships with our customers and with our, our, our brand itself in a way.
Yeah. It goes to those. There was a question somebody posted on Twitter back in ages ago, May, I think. What do you think the biggest skills gap is for today's marketers? And your colleague, Claire Atkin, had a great response to, like, ironically advertising that, you know, we've you know, marketers have everyone relies on a certain, you know, a few a few mega platforms to kinda do all the heavy lifting, and nobody nobody kind of knows where their ads are going, etcetera.
What's up? So this we'll talk about brand safety first, and then we'll dig into design and enforcement of Ts and Cs and content moderation, stuff like that. For startups, you know, if you're if you're a scrappy startup, and you've got a pretty lean budget for marketing, you know, like, maybe you've got one person and no budget, or maybe you've got, you know, just a small team with a small budget.
And things like Facebook ads, etc, or ad roll or whatever it is, you know, they're just the go to for so many people. What would you say to those startups if, you know, should they just avoid all these platforms? Or are there ways to use these platforms, but in a, in a more conscientious way?
Yeah, that's a great question. I would say use these platforms with caution. I want to give you an example of what's going on on the other end of a plat of a retargeting platform like say Criteo or Adwole. We Claire actually was looking at headphones dot com for a bit one day and then she went back to browsing disinformation sites because this is what her life looks like.
And she found that headphones dot com was appearing all over the place. It was in all the sort of hate speech and disinfo sites. And so she contacted the CEO and she was like, hey, like, you know, she sent him screenshots and said, hey, you know, you're on all these sites you probably don't want to be on.
Headphones dot com is high end headphones. These are like eight hundred dollars headphones. This is, you know, not a throwaway type purchase. You don't, not only do you not want to be on these sites, you also don't need to be on these sites.
There's, there's no reason for headphones dot com to be appearing on epochtimes dot com. So we, we ended up doing an audit for them. We asked for a list of their site placements on, which was served through Criteo. And when we went in, we saw, I mean, we saw what we were expecting to see, which is that, you know, he wasn't, headphones dot com was not only appearing on one or two of the sites that we had seen, but it was dozens and it was all the sort of the usual
suspects, really sort of high profile disinfo sites. I mean, one of, one of the sites that I'm always talking about is the Gateway Pundit. They were, so they were effectively funding all of these websites. We also found them appearing on a bunch of Latin American sites, like Spanish language sites, which is inappropriate for a couple of reasons.
One, these ads are, you know, English ads on a on a Spanish language newspaper. If you're really targeting for that, you wanna have those ads in Spanish. The second thing is they don't even ship to Latin America. So why are your ads on, you know, on that, on sites in Latin America?
So overall Oh, and the third thing was they were appearing on, all these sort of low end Android apps, which made no sense for their business because again, these are really, really, high end headphones. So basically we told them to scrap all those three things and, and report back.
And what we found was that their ad spend went down from twelve hundred dollars a day, dollars twelve hundred a day to ninety five. I'm sorry, to forty five to forty dollars a day. So that was a ninety five percent drop in their spend without any change in performance.
So what does that tell us? That tells us that they, that like, first of all Criteo has made it very difficult for them to see what sites that they are actually appearing on. So when you go into your Criteo dashboard, the one that they've made for you, it's all sort of the aggregate.
So you can see the aggregate conversions, the aggregate impressions, the aggregate clicks. But if you ask for a site level list, if you ask for, you know, to understand which sites actually drove performance and drove conversions, they make it very difficult for you to see that.
And that is the default setting. That's because they don't want you to know how your money is being spent. And this is not just a one off thing. It's not a fluke. A couple of years ago, JP Morgan, what is it? Chase Bank did a similar experiment.
They, they found that they were appearing on four hundred thousand websites when they went in to check their site list. And, and they experimented with a five thousand manual, five thousand long manual site lists. So five thousand sites they knew they wanted to be on.
And they found that, that their, their performance didn't change at all when they switched from four hundred thousand to five thousand. So this is happening across the board. It's happening whether you're a startup or whether you're a big company. And maybe you are not, maybe you feel like, you know, even if you don't care about necessarily how your brand looks when it appears on a site like the Gateway Pundit, hopefully you care about money, right?
Because if you're, you know, if you're saving, if you're what is it, spending eleven hundred dollars a day, like, like headphones dot com was doing, that is effectively just trash. What could you do with eleven hundred dollars that could actually make a difference to your business?
So, I mean, I kind of half joked that they could have just given away a pair of headphones every day at that at that rate and and probably have more impact with that, you know, with sort of giving away their headphones to maybe influencers or random people on Twitter.
Who knows? Just give away the headphones, see what happens. Then working with a company like Criteo and just throwing your money away in places that you don't even that you don't even know. Yeah, that's a that's pretty amazing. The the amount of waste.
Aside from, I guess, the two sides, two sides, like you say, and if we, if you can't reach people through the, I guess, the moral argument, then the economic argument will probably land. And what about for, for businesses, especially for smaller businesses who, who kind of end up with their brand all over these places that they probably don't want to be.
How do they? First of all, how does that impact? Are there SEO impacts and stuff like that if you're on? Like, you were on, if you were advertising on porn sites, that would have an impact on your SEO. But for hate sites, I think maybe not so much.
Maybe you can talk us through that a little bit. But how do how do companies recover from this? How do they you know, is there is there a big impact with their, with their audience with people, you know, seeing, I can't believe headphones dot com was doing this thing or, you know, how does how do they go about that?
Well, the important thing to remember is that we understand all of us in this room today understand how digital advertising works, but our audience doesn't necessarily understand how it works. I understand perfectly how programmatic advertising works and it still shocks me and upsets me to see Link Home ads on Gateway Pundit or Geller Report.
It's, it's even if you understand it is still not a good look for you. Does it matter if your ad appears on a bad site, on a bad faith publisher? That's what we call them. Because a lot of these guys are not advertising oh, sorry, they're not producing content in good faith.
Yes, it still matters because you have a brand that you invest in every day, whether it's through your marketing decisions, whether it's because you want to bring in the best talent, whether it's because you want to reach a certain kind of customer. And you, you presumably invest not just money, but your efforts into building that brand.
And that brand is something that you can't, you can't take back, right? Like you can't take back those, those bad, know, bad decisions or bad ad placements. So what it means when you advertise on a bad faith publisher, it means that you are handing them your money.
At the end of the day, you're not doing it. You're not handing them a lot of cash. You're not walking into a back alley and handing them a lot of cash. You're doing it through Google, but that is still how they make money.
So you kind of have to not only answer for that, you also have to answer for the fact that, that you are supporting bad faith efforts to sort of undermine our society. When you, you know, when you turn on your ads, you have to answer for that.
And, you know, sure people don't know on a daily basis necessarily where your ads are going. They're not all like on disinformation sites like I am every day. But if you are found on one of those websites, if you are, you know, if, if someone does place your screenshot on Twitter, that's something that you have to contend with because that undermines the rest of your marketing efforts.
All that stuff that your staff and your employees are working on every single day can be undermined by your, by your ad placements. So this is something that you need to think about in terms of your overall brand equity. What kind of brands do we want to be building over time for the long term?
And, and how do we support that through our everyday advertising decisions? So just a quick, quick mention to the audience, if folks if you want Nandini to answer your questions, get them in there on either on the chat app or through Twitter. And we'll we'll get those questions into, into the conversation.
And something you mentioned there about your you spent your days looking at pretty, pretty grim parts of the web of the internet. And yet you seem to be a pretty positive person. How do you how do you manage that? I mean, there's there's got to be a mental health strain in digging through the worst parts of humanity, I guess, a lot of ways.
How do you how do you stay positive? Doctor. That's a great question, because I don't always stay positive. Yeah. We, so I, I certainly have a robust community on Twitter and it really helps to, you know, what I do is I, I, I tweet out pretty much everything that I see when I'm online and often forget about it because there's just such a, you know, I just put things on blast every day and sometimes I hear back, you know, so, you know, I tweeted out back in January that,
Mailchimp was the email service provider for a white nationalist named Stefan Molyneux. I didn't know if I was going to hear back or not, but they actually got back to me in a couple of hours and said that they had, they had dropped him, which was great news.
I was attacked relentlessly for two days after that for at least a week actually by white nationalists, apologists and trolls and stuff. But, but it was really great at the end of the day too, to see that response happen. The same goes with companies like PayPal, you know, Google.
I'm constantly in contact with these companies now. You know, I don't know what's going on in the inside necessarily. They don't tell me, but, but they do respond to my emails a lot of the time. Like it's good to know that I, that I have some sort of, sort of influence.
My emails are being opened. These conversations are happening. People are realizing that this is not a one time problem that's going to go away and they are starting to look for systemic, solutions, which I think is ultimately positive that, that, that is a conversation that hasn't happened over the past four years.
It's been uncomfortable for people to have. And, and now we're sort of, what we're sort of doing at Check My Ads is helping them understand that it's not a political conversation at all. It's really about making decisions that are aligned with your, with your brand values.
And once that kind of clicks in place, teams feel a lot more comfortable making this decision these decisions. So I think that we're overall moving in the right direction. Are you seeing in in the bigger companies? Are they creating brand safety teams? Is that becoming a thing?
Yeah. Yeah. People are hiring brand safety officers. They are creating brand safety roadmaps even. So this this, what I like to say about brand safety is that it's not a one time thing. You're not going to fix the problem overnight. You're not even going to fix the problem in a year or two years.
This is, you know, as long as we have programmatic advertising, as long as we're beholden to this ecosystem, we are going to need to constantly be reviewing our brand safety and advertising decisions the way that we reviewed any product roadmap. We're going to need to perform experiments, you know, to see what is working for us because of course brand safety is, is, is not just a branding issue.
It's also, you know, how can we continue to reach our, our audience, our demographics in the same way or in at least as, as, as an, as effective of a way. How do we balance out those marketing decisions? That's, you know, I don't have the answer to that and I don't know.
And I think it really depends on what your company is and what your company wants to do with their marketing strategy over time, as well as, you know, in the short term. So, so companies are starting to think about this in a long term way knowing that there's, there's no end to this unpredictability that we we've seen for the past four years.
It's just going to keep happening. We're going to continue to find our ads on disinformation sites. We're going to have to block them. Then there's going be new ones that pop up, and we're gonna have to make decisions on all those too. So maybe the other side of this of this coin of taking responsibility for how your brand and content and product appears on the web and is used is around content moderation, but specifically something you've you I've seen you mentioned a bit on Twitter is
acceptable use policies. And I guess that Mailchimp example is maybe highlights where, you know, they were they had the power to, to say, you know, to kick that guy off their platform. And, you know, they'd already, I assume they'd already written the the Ts and Cs that gave them that.
Are is there is there a is this an area that needs a lot more attention? How much are software companies, tech companies aware of the power or the importance of their acceptable use policies? So I used to be head of growth for Prodpad, as you know.
And my job at that company as a marketer was to get people to sign up for the product. And I didn't care who was signing up for my product. That is not my concern. It was just knowing that they signed up because that, that was how I was evaluated as a, as a marketer at the company.
So that is how marketing has operated for quite a while now. We, we've made this to be such a frictionless experience. We make it as easy as possible to go from, I don't know, like from, from, from your landing page to the signup page to, you know, to conversion, to turning them, you know, into a free user and then hopefully a paid user.
That's how software has been working for at least, you know, ten years now. We, I think need to revisit that, that design, what we, what we believe to be the best way to convert. Because yes, we can, we can, we are converting more users that way, but who are those users?
It doesn't necessarily matter as much for a product management software company, I guess. And I'm willing to be challenged on that, but we have companies like PayPal and Stripe and Mailchimp and Substack and all sorts of companies and platforms. And even the ones that you don't think about very often, like, I don't know, like donorbox dot com, there is another one called philantro dot com.
These are all sort of donor and payment processor websites or platforms. And they're all, they, you know, because they have that similar ethos, you know, we want to get people in the door. They, they end up working with like Nazi groups or the, you know, that's how the pay the, the KKK was, you know, PayPal was working with the KKK.
And that combined with not knowing what to do with those groups. Once those groups have been identified has been a really big problem. And again, that's because process. They don't really understand what it is that they need to do with groups that are not doing illegal things because that's what a trust and safety department did before, you know, kind of deal with the illegal abuse.
Just like clearly this isn't against the law. But now we're at a point where there's, there's, you know, groups that are really good at drawing with within the lines and they're not doing anything illegal necessarily. And they use careful language so that technically they're not, they're not like violating any rules, but, you know, Stephane Molyneux, the white nationalist who, you know, who was, who's very good at drawing within the lines inspired several mass shooters and he talks about eugenics and he does it in a way that is if you're, you know,
kind of just glancing at it, it seems like it's, oh, it's, it's like his opinion, but it's actually Eugenics. So you have to, you know, have a way to, to be able to review this. You have to be able to say this is what it is and you know, for XYZ reasons we are not going to work with it.
You need to, you know, this is also a branding decision for a company. It's a branding decision when Mailchimp decides not to work with a guy like that. It seems like, if we've been having this conversation maybe five years ago, people might have thought, oh, you know, you're overreacting or this is this there.
These are isolated incidents or whatever. And I think most or many of us have had our eyes opened over the past. You know, certainly the the the recent the the US presidency that we've just been through, but also, you know, now twenty twenty one with vaccine rollout, etcetera, there's gonna be lots of messaging challenges there.
Like this, this is stuff that really, really matters. And there's a there's a question in actually, on that from Greg Wasserstrom, who I think is a pal of yours. I saw you guys chatting on Twitter actually yesterday. Twitter pals. So, yeah, okay. So his question is, he says, it's safe to say that at this point, you and Claire are spearheading a growing movement of folks who not only want to support your work, but help help transform the way advertisers think about brand safety.
Is there a way we can develop a shared tool set to bring your ideas to our work without eating into your consulting business? So it's a good question. That's a great question. I think the bigger picture question is how can people help? There are so many ways to help.
You know, I don't have to be the only person who puts out screenshots like this. That's free to do. We can all, all put out screenshots. It's not just the screenshots that matter. It's framing the question that matters. So when we first started this campaign at Sleeping Giants, the question that we asked advertisers was, do you really want to be supporting this racist website?
And they could not answer that question. You know, they, they couldn't because they were, their ads were there. They needed to, the only answer is no, right? And I think that question was really pivotal. The framing of the conversation is really pivotal. And that has only proven to be more true as, as time has gone on.
And as, and as I've taken this method and started working on, on tech platforms and then asked sort of started asking questions to the ad tech industry. That really matters that we are, that we continue to ask these questions loudly and to hold leadership accountable.
Because the way that the world works now is that we all sort of live out our lives on social media. So much happens on social media. And if you can be out there joining me and asking these questions and insisting on, you know, receiving a response, which you can do because it's social media, we're having this conversation out in public.
That is, I think one of the most helpful things to us as a movement and to our work. Claire and my work at Check My Ads, because what we eventually end up doing is the way that we work with these, with these companies as they come in and they have collected your, your feedback, your questions, and they are now grappling with how to answer them.
And so to sort of, I guess, get them to this point where they, where they actually want to figure out an answer, they need to be, they need to be engaged in dialogue. So if you can just keep being loud on social media, keep asking questions and not just yes or no questions, but like, can you explain what your process is?
What is your disinformation policy? How did your, how did this ad end up here? How did this ad end up in your, or how did this website end up in your inventory? Keep asking these questions and let's see how they answer. On the with check my ads, what, what kind of companies are you are you working with?
And for example, like for smaller startups that are looking for help with this kind of thing? Is that do you work with them? I mean, is that is it is this going to be out of their reach? Or what way does that that work?
Well, we just launched in launched in June. And one of our goals is to work with I mean, we kind of launched with this intent to work with the biggest companies that we could, that we could work with, because that's where the change happens.
We know that if, if, if fortune five hundred companies reach out to us and say, we need help, we want to change the way that we advertise that that will have a massive knock on effect in the rest of the industry. And that is exactly what has, has happened.
We're working with, with Fortune five hundred and global brands. And we're able to tackle multi million dollar budgets this way. And I think those are the companies that we continue to work with in the near future. But we are also thinking about how we can scale our work in a way that is more accessible to, to smaller budget startups and, and small business small and medium sized businesses.
The so you're you I think you're seen online as an activist a lot, but you're also very clearly an entrepreneur. And, you know, with Check My Ads is is this really, really interesting and exciting venture that you and Claire Atkin have got going on.
What does what does success look like for you? What, like, ten years from now? Where would you like to be? Because it kind of seems like the more successful you are, the more you'd be ultimately like, if you were if you were super successful, that would be the end of your this, this role, right?
You know, you guys would no longer be needed. Sort of a superhero scenario. So what, what do you hope for like ten years from now? Yeah, you nailed it, Brian. Ten years from now, I don't want to be doing this. I had hopes and dreams.
I had a very different set of hopes and dreams before I started this work. I would like to be out of a job. I would like for Check My Ads to, to not have to exist, at least in this particular form. I've always loved marketing and branding.
And I think that I would love to actually go back to just, you know, before this work I was working on products, product messaging and helping companies come with product narratives, telling their story and telling, making their pitches and stuff. That's, that's sort of my first love.
I hope to, to actually go back to what I wanted to do, like right before I started check my ads and right before I decided to work in this stuff full time, I was about to become a messaging coach. Because I think it's so important and powerful to be able to tell your story.
I think if you get that, if you nail that, you can, you can achieve so much more. Your marketing goes further, your advertising goes further, people root for you, people want to help you, people want to, of course, buy from you. I think that's really incredible.
I think it's one of the best ways and the best skills you can have to change the world. So I want to equip more people to be able to do that, whether that is in business or in activism. So maybe a maybe a practical question to to finish up because we're pretty much out of time.
For smaller and earlier stage businesses that want to, that want to go about making sure their brand is is safe. What are the first steps? How do how do they start understanding and auditing, you know, for example, where their marketing is showing? Yeah, great question. The first step is to check your ads.
Go into your site placements, go into your Google display network and see where your ads are appearing. What we recommend is that you go and look at your you'll get a CSV file, sort it by spend so you can see where the majority of your money is going.
Usually that's where the conversation starts. You'll find yourself appearing on, of course, like a bunch of, you know, bad websites, like bad faith publishers that you've probably heard of. But you'll also find that your ads are appearing on sites that people don't really visit.
So these are, these are probably, you know, bot sites. These are sites that exist to bring in bot traffic. And that means that you are not only, you know, your ads are not only on hate speech, but also you're just kind of wasting money on ads that people never see.
So you'll start to see this. You'll start to go visit these websites and you'll start to, that'll start to create questions and you can, you can set up a meeting with your team and decide, you know, look at these sites together and decide whether you really want to be there.
Okay, so it's a, yeah, it's a great incentive, right? If you make the web a little bit of a better place, protect your brand, and don't waste your money all at the same time. Okay. So we're we're we're out of time. But it's been it's been great to catch up.
And I hope it's been good for the audience to hear a year on this the next phase of your very impressive career and sort of, it's been lightning fast how it's all been happening. I mean, you and I met in February, I think of last year was first time we met at Saster.
Yeah. And yeah, you were you had a whole different career in mind at that point. Yeah. But this is, you know, you've kind of been pulled into this by, I guess it's it's kind of become a calling, but it's also something that you're really good at.
And I just want to say thank you for doing it. Because it's, it's great work. It's amazing to see the impact that it's having. There's a long way to go, of course. But yeah, you're, you're definitely starting a movement. So keep going. Unknown Thank you so much for your support, Brian.
Unknown Not at all. Not at all. It's great to it's great to be able to to yeah, to lend that support to someone doing some great work. So that's it for now. Next time in Edinburgh, you know, we'll see if we can make that happen.
Yeah, but until until then, stay safe and keep going. Thank you so much. Thanks, Nandini. Okay, so that was cool to to catch up with one of last year's most popular and fascinating speakers. And like we said, doing tremendous work. Checkmyads dot org is I think is the is her is Nandini and Claire's new new consulting company.
But yeah, you've you've got some practical tips now on how you can make your brand a little bit better and make the web a little bit better. But that's it for today. We're that's the end of week seven. So we've one week to go this day next week.
It's all it's all going to be finished. But we've got we've got a great lineup coming next week to to wrap it all up. We'll we'll get details of that into your inbox. It's all on the website, of course. But again, thanks to our partners, in particular, Amazon Dev Center in Scotland, current health, Deliveroo, Mailchimp and administrate.
And also free agent shouldn't forget them longtime supporters. So that's it for today. We'll see you again soon.
