Nandini Jammi wants you to put her company out of business. Really.
Jammi is co-founder of Check My Ads Institute, the ad tech industry’s first independent nonprofit watchdog. It launched in 2021 with the goal of defunding disinformation online by exposing how money flows through the twisted pipes of the programmatic supply chain.
Armed with Ads.txt and Sellers.json files, Jammi and her co-founder, Claire Atkin, painstakingly trace the often (OK, always) opaque relationships between publishers and ad exchanges.
And they’re not afraid to name names publicly when the parties involved, once notified, don’t take action to stop the flow of ad dollars to toxic or hateful content.
It’s the definition of truth to power.
But in an ideal world, Jammi says, her services would no longer be required because marketers would finally have transparency into where their programmatic ad dollars are going.
Going out of business “is actually our success metric,” she says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
“We want to go out of business: Put us out of business,” Jammi says. “I want to go back to my old job – I loved my old job. I love this job, too, but I really hope we don’t have to be around forever.”
Before launching Check My Ads, Jammi was co-founder of Sleeping Giants, the social media activist group that persuaded thousands of brands to pull their ads from Breitbart. Before that, Jammi ran B2B marketing campaigns for SaaS tech companies, and it’s a gig she enjoyed.
It might not be possible, though, to go back to the “blissfully unaware” days before she started actively acquainting herself with the skeletons in ad tech’s closet. Once you know … you know.
“Not many marketers know how ad operations actually works, like what happens when you click the buttons on the dashboard,” Jammi says. “The real problem here is a lack of transparency around our own data.”
Also in this episode: The importance of getting your hands on log-level data, CTV’s brand safety problem and going behind the scenes on a recent Check My Ads investigation into a little-known ad network that’s helping monetize patriots.win, the self-hosted successor to The_Donald subreddit, which was banned by Reddit in June 2020 for violating the platform’s policies on harassment, hate speech and inciting violence.
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