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Brands are still spending literally billions of dollars to advertise on websites that spread misinformation, propagating election fraud conspiracies, anti-vax myths, and of course, fake news.
That’s according to an analysis conducted by NewsGuard, an organization that helps marketers avoid running ads on disreputable sites, and measurement company Comscore.
- The two cross-referenced 7,500 sites to estimate digital ad spend.
- The findings: 1.68% of display ad spend went to sites that NewsGuard considers “misinformation publishers.” According to the report, that equates to roughly *drumroll* $2.6 billion in global ad spend per year.
Now, most brands don’t want to be funding questionable sites, but they end up there through the mechanisms of programmatic advertising. NewsGuard crafts exclusion lists that brands can use to stop their ads from running on hoax sites and the like, but detractors say such lists can hinder the reach and scale of programmatic advertising.
NewsGuard refutes this by pointing to a recent study it conducted with a “top brand advertiser” that found its tools helped the company lower CPMs while driving higher click-through rates.
“There’s nothing necessarily wrong with programmatic advertising—the question is, who’s taking responsibility for where the ads are running?” NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz told Marketing Brew. “Advertisers have assumed their brand safety companies have fixed this for them, but they haven’t. Misinformation requires human assessment.”—RB