The digital age has created an environment that connects customers to products with incredible ease, but with it can come the complications of an automated advertising world. Recently, for businesses with diverse consumer bases, issues with controversial online ad placement have become all too common.
Earlier this year, hundreds of companies including Nordstrom, Uber and BMW have publicly pulled ads from the controversial alt-right site Breitbart News, but the effort to pull back ads aren’t always successful. Because companies are constantly under the microscope of a watchful and often unforgiving public eye, a number of Boston University professors recently expressed that in the digital world of advertising, simple right and wrong decisions aren’t always so simple.
SumOfUs is one of several organizations that are urging people to put pressure on companies to remove their advertising from sites such as Breitbart News. Citing zero tolerance policies regarding discrimination, SumOfUs draws connections to the rhetoric used on Breitbart News in order to encourage corporations such as Amazon to change their position on the matter. But even if organizations and the public are able to pursue corporations to terminate advertisements on particular sites, it isn’t always easy or successful to accomplish.
According to John Verret, CEO of Verret and Associates and a former professor of advertising at BU’s College of Communication, all arrows point to technology and the complexity of a profit-fueled market.
“It’s called programmatic buying,” he said. “It’s just entering into a bidding war online … these programs are pretty automatic.”
Alongside tracking customer’s habits through computer IP addresses via cookies, programmatic buying is a system of algorithms designed to sell large quantities of ads to hundreds or even thousands of websites, he said. Ad agencies use these approaches in tandem to connect advertisers to customers.
Susan Fournier, the senior associate dean for faculty and marketing professor in BU’s Questrom School of Business, explained that blacklists aren’t necessarily a great idea for companies with diverse consumers.
“What’s the ramification of even making that list, and then trying act on it and make very it public?” she said. “Any time you’re going to do that you are going to polarize people. And people are gonna be in and people are gonna be out.”
Most companies have made an effort to publicize their immediate actions to stop running ads on sites that their employee and customer base finds offensive. Companies such as Johnson and Johnson and AT&T pulled their advertising from YouTube properties, concerned their ads would run beside offensive content, according to a New York Times article.
Regardless of the amount of customers that agree with decisions such as the one made by Nordstrom, or the concern with questionable content on certain sites, not everyone might be troubled by the ad placement.
“You’ve just turned your businesses into a political environment,” Fournier said.
As shown by recent news, many companies have gone out of their way to take political stances. Starbucks, for instance, has been a proponent of making political statements that align with its company’s values.
However, for companies entering the political realm by blacklisting partisan-oriented sites, they may be opening themselves up to even more backlash, Verret said.
“It’s a big public relations problem for them,” Verret said. “The problem with it is, if they go out and draw more attention to what is happening, it exposes what is happening to a much bigger [customer] base.”
Some companies, such as JPMorgan Chase have turned back the clock on advertising. Creating a pre-approved list of sites to advertise on, instead of relying on programming, in order to avoid being placed on controversial sites and those who disseminate unverified news.
But many companies do not have the financial ability that JPMorgan does to play with their own advertising fate. Stopping the use of algorithms-based advertising isn’t always a viable option.
“They can get those ad placements at a much lower costs [using programmatic buying] than if they went directly to these major media platforms,” said Michelle Amazeen, a professor in BU’s department of Mass Communication, Advertising and Public Relations.
But removing the subjective human element in advertising means mistakes are going to be hard to avoid. Programs use data and data can’t always get it right, she explained.
“There’s only so much that computers can do,” Amazeen said.
With the problem rooted in technology and advertising budgets, and with no quick fix in existence, it is likely that these issues are going to plague online advertising for some time.
The problem may be complicated but the baseline objective seems much more simple — advertise wisely.
“It’s not only reaching the right people, at the right place at the right time,” Amazeen said, “but it’s also that you’re reaching them in the right environment.”
Algorithms not logarithms… same typo twice.