In moves-that-just-make-sense news, Arielle Garcia has joined digital advertising watchdog Check My Ads as director of intelligence.
Garcia made waves last year when she publicly resigned her role as UM Worldwide’s chief privacy and responsibility officer.
She was brutally honest about her struggles to reconcile her values with the imperatives of the large agency holding company model – a model rife, as she wrote in a column for AdExchanger, “with competing interests and conflicting loyalties, shackled to the industry status quo by dysfunctional interdependencies.”
But if there’s one thing that Check My Ads is not, it’s shackled to the industry status quo.
Check My Ads exists to shine a spotlight into ad tech’s dark corners.
It was founded in 2021 by Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin as a nonprofit dedicated to defunding disinformation, supporting legitimate journalism and putting pressure on ad tech companies to operate more transparently.
“This mission is very much aligned with the way I’ve been thinking about the ecosystem,” said Garcia, who, after leaving UM in September, founded her own consultancy and advisory firm, ASG Solutions, which focuses on privacy and responsible data use.
In her new role, Garcia, who started in mid-March, will direct the Check My Ads research agenda and develop campaigns and programs that advocate for transparency and reforming the online ad industry.
Garcia spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: Sunlight is the best disinfectant, but is there enough sunlight to “fix” ad tech?
ARIELLE GARCIA: Yes, if you focus that sunlight in the right places and take it a step further.
We need transparency to demonstrate that the current way isn’t good for marketers because they have the right to know what they’re buying and whether it’s garbage.
But you can’t just tell people, “It’s all been a lie,” and leave it there. The purpose of our research is to expose problems and help foster solutions.
You spent more than a decade at IPG, so you know what makes the online ad ecosystem tick. How will that industry experience help in the new role?
So much of this is about understanding the dynamics between all the different players in this strange soap opera that we call the digital ad industry.
You need a strong sense of the motivations underpinning each side to do research that really digs in. And you also need to know which rocks to turn over to find the answers you’re looking for.
For example, look at the recent news with Forbes [and its MFA subdomain]. It’s easy to read that at a surface level and to walk away thinking, “Forbes did a very bad thing,” and that’s it. Yes, Forbes did, but there are so many other questions that the report raises.
What kinds of questions?
Like, what exactly is the point of third-party verification vendors if they’re not verifying? Is there a problem with their business model? What exactly are TAG and the MRC doing in terms of systemic change?
Which rocks do you plan to flip over with your research?
It’s still early, and I don’t want to be too prescriptive, but I can say we’ll be digging into data-enabled harms. Basically, the fact that marketers are effectively paying for bad data to reach fake people on unsafe sites while democracy dies.
That’s quite an encapsulation.
There’s a ton of research to do into bad data, especially with third-party cookie deprecation looming. There’s an identity solutions arms race happening, and a lot of what I’m seeing is a desperate effort to sustain existing business models rather than actually solving any of the root problems.
Such as?
Such as, it’s time to unpack some of the illusion that precision always means relevance and effectiveness.
Is the online ad industry too obsessed with cookie deprecation and not concerned enough with, say, regulators getting more serious about enforcement?
I don’t think there’s necessarily too much focus on deprecation, but some of the solutions that are being positioned as the way forward aren’t so different from what got us here in the first place.
Yes, Google’s dominance is problematic for society, marketers, publishers – for pretty much everyone – but so is ubiquitous tracking. Both of those things are true.
The fact is a lot of the issues within the industry have to do with broken incentive structures, and sunlight is the only way to change that.
Is the industry ready for change – as in doing it, not just talking about it?
One of the things that surprised me when I left UM was the clear groundswell of industry support. The challenges we’re dealing with now are existential, including for the future of journalism. If we keep going down the road we’re on, the industry is headed straight into a brick wall, and I don’t think that’s lost on people.
Let’s do a little lightning round. What’s a good short-term achievable goal for the ad industry?
Not having any more seven-year-long MFA schemes [like Forbes] would be a good one.
What’s a negative headline about the data-driven ad industry you’d like to never see again?
That health data is being used to push OxyContin on pain sufferers.
If you could send a one-line message to Google, what would it be?
Be transparent once and for all.
What about your message to ad tech companies?
Be transparent once and for all!
And what about publishers?
Be courageous enough to use this opportunity to rethink your business models.
And your message to agency holding companies?
My message would be a question: Do you have a five-year plan?
Answers have been lightly edited and condensed.
For more articles featuring Arielle Garcia, click here.
