In May 2020, the American magazine Wired opened Pandora's box and launched a harsh attack on the lucrative programmatic advertising industry when it decided to publish explosive passages from the book Death by Truth by Steven Brill, journalist and founder of the "brand safety" company NewsGuard. In this book, Brill reveals that the American billionaire Warren Buffett was inadvertently the main financial arm of the Russian news agency Sputnik News in 2019, alongside the government led by Vladimir Putin.

But why would the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway want to invest his money in a Russian state media outlet? The answer to this question is simpler than it seems (and it inevitably involves programmatic advertising). It turns out that the American insurance company Geico, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, inadvertently became the main advertiser on Sputnik News (except after the fact).

Geico managed its online campaigns through large programmatic advertising platforms that placed its ads on Sputnik News. At the time, these programmatic advertising platforms had access to an average of 44,000 websites and controlled the ads that appeared on these websites using sophisticated algorithms that reacted in real time to supply and demand. Because of the high volume of websites to which its advertising was potentially exposed, Geico was never able to control where exactly its ads appeared.

According to Brill, the main danger lurking in the shadows of programmatic advertising platforms is that these platforms try to connect with the Internet user in an exceptionally precise way. And the content and context of the websites where ads appear play a role that is by no means decisive in their placement and is data that advertisers are never aware of.

In his book, Brill laments that there is a whole plethora of brands affected by the problems hidden in programmatic advertising and accuses those who operate in this industry of being perfectly aware of these problems and doing little or nothing to solve them.

Advertisers have only two truly effective tools at their disposal to control where their advertising appears:

Lists that specifically include or exclude certain websites.
Blocking certain words so that advertising does not make its way into undesirable environments (such as Sputnik News, for example).

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Google was quick to assure that it would pause advertising on those websites that were favorable to the war. What Google didn't say, however, was that its ban was restricted to the most obvious sites devoted to spreading Russian propaganda, RT and Sputnik News, and thus ignored hundreds of other sites that also promoted disinformation.

These and other smaller sites, which compete with larger, more prestigious outlets, are heavily represented on programmatic advertising platforms. And according to Brill, sites especially focused on spreading disinformation have quickly learned to dodge blocked words, something that the big publishers, who routinely use blocked words like "Ukraine" and "invasion" in their articles, are therefore left high and dry and without access to potential programmatic advertising revenue, are not so good at.

As long as programmatic advertising focuses solely on the desired audience and completely ignores the content, the ads end up on problematic websites (and can cause real problems for brands).
Can contextual marketing solve the problems of programmatic advertising?

The research undertaken by Brill concludes that in 2020, approximately 1.62 billion dollars were invested in advertising in the United States that ended up making its way to websites dedicated to disinformation. That same year, American news websites generated advertising revenue of 3.5 billion dollars. If these news websites (often plagued by financial problems) could attract the advertising that "leaks" to websites focused on disinformation, their turnover would jump by almost 50%, says Brill.

Today, programmatic advertising is the dominant form of advertising in the display advertising market. A report by eMarketer concludes that programmatic advertising swallows up almost 90% of the display advertising market in the United States (the equivalent of 160 billion dollars in 2024).

The problem is, in this sense, of absolutely cyclical dimensions.lopeas, Brill denounces, and advertisers who throw themselves into the arms of programmatic advertising risk seeing their reputation damaged and also ending up paying for the misinformation issued by foreign state entities.

Brill insists that programmatic advertising is burdened by a problem of a systemic nature because it puts all the focus on the target audience and simultaneously leaves the context in which the ads are placed in the shadows.

There are, however, possible solutions to the problem. And contextual targeting, conveniently amalgamated with the capabilities of large language models, could solve the scourge that follows programmatic advertising like a bad shadow.

When contextual targeting is applied to programmatic advertising, the placement of the ads is decided based on the context of the websites on which they are going to appear. To achieve this, the algorithms analyze the content of the websites (including text, images and videos), and also extract keywords and themes. The ads are then selected in real time based on the contextual analysis previously carried out by the algorithms and placed on the most suitable websites. In this way, the content of the ads and the content of the websites on which they land are to a certain extent aligned.

If properly perfected, this technology could put an end to the insidious problems directly related to "brand safety". And it would benefit not only advertisers but also the media and ultimately democracy as well.

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