The most bogus claim to come out of a presidential campaign is Haitian immigrants in Ohio stealing and eating pets. But just as troubling are ads of big companies, including Amazon, Kia and AT&T, found right next to articles advancing that debunked narrative.
To understand the depressing technology-driven nexus of gross misinformation and blue-chip advertisers that unwittingly help fund such folderol, it helps to return to the glory days of three-martini lunches at the restaurant in Chicago’s Wrigley Building.
The restaurant in the century-old landmark built by chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr., which closed in 1989, was a luncheon and dinner haven for advertising’s “mad men and women.” They gossiped, flirted, got tanked and nurtured deals for ads placed in newspapers, and on radio and television, in a quaint pre-internet media age.
The drinks were big, the salads bigger and the veal scaloppine once a mere $2.40. The locale was, recalls the Tribune’s Rick Kogan, formal but unpretentious, even if the maître d’ wore a tuxedo at lunch. Mahogany paneling and a second-level balcony gave the place a clubby feel. Smoking was very much permitted.
Like the advertising business itself, it was really about people, not machines.
“We basically had network TV (three networks), local market TV, radio, newspapers and magazines,” said Jim Hilmer, an executive in ad giant Leo Burnett’s Chicago office from 1969 to 1984. “It was a simple world, and buyers specialized. The big money was in network television, and buyers bought big packages of numerous shows for a season.”
Buyers would pick up a phone, call the media outlet they desired and ask for their “avails,” or available ad inventory, said Hilmer, now retired in Florida. “A sales rep would bring the avails to the agency, and the negotiation would begin. Because buyers specialized and the options were limited, buyers knew the content they were buying.”
“There is no way a buyer today can know all the content,” he said. For sure, nobody can have a handle on the millions of websites, podcasts, TV shows, YouTubers and blogs.
Yes, deals were cut at long lunches at the Wrigley, Corona Café and legendary Chez Paul, said Clark Bell, former Sun-Times marketing media columnist and veteran business journalist. Relationships also were built at social and industry events.
Equally important, advertisers and agencies could comfortably grasp what they were buying and when and where it would reach an intended audience.
Then, as now, targeting was paramount. Hilmer might earmark women 18 to 49 to hawk laundry detergent and would horse-trade with media outlets. With network TV, he might cut a deal whereby he would get spots on several high-rated shows but then also had to take spots on a few weak ones, too.
There might be vigorous arguments. Now, the search for precise targeting often cedes control to emotionless technology. The illusion of the process being more sophisticated drives a partnership that leads famous brands to unknowingly enrich purveyors of misinformation such as the lie that Haitians are eating cats.
The disastrous associations are frequently revealed by NewsGuard, which does credibility assessments of news and information sites, podcasts and TV news shows.
It’s because ads you see likely are determined by “programmatic advertising,” which relies on algorithms to automatically place ads. (Disclosure: NewsGuard licenses inclusion and exclusion lists of websites to enable brands to select where their ads appear.)
Programmatic advertising supplants mad men and women. It relies on algorithms to supposedly target ads at a specific demographic group said to consume a particular media outlet.
Humans design the sales strategy and create the product’s message (although artificial intelligence may change that, too). But algorithms then take over, matching buyers and sellers, and too often idiotically place an ad on a website peddling racism, homophobia and blatant misinformation. A report by NewsGuard and Comscore, a media measurement firm, found that misinformation websites are getting $2.6 billion a year in programmatic advertising — that’s 2.6 billion reasons that spreading false claims and conspiracy theories is such a good business.
My colleagues recently identified ads for 36 major brands appearing on articles advancing the false narratives about Haitian migrants. It is a claim still repeated by former President Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance.
NewsGuard found nine articles across eight websites that both advanced the claim and had ads for blue-chip companies alongside those stories.
Similarly, The New York Times found ads for major brands, such as Mazda, on YouTube videos advancing the falsehoods about Haitian immigrants. Videos accompanied by such ads generated 1.6 million YouTube views soon after Trump first repeated the falsehood, The Times said.
Ultimately, the turn to algorithms is a natural result of what Hilmer concedes is an overarching advertising industry reality: too much content, too much complexity and a quest for data, since few in the ad world can ever prove what actually works to sell a product, anyway.
So, desktop screens replace the global fraternity of buyers and sellers, and unsuspecting advertisers are victimized by a false reliance on what appears to be fact-filled digital innovation.
It was much simpler, and perhaps less dangerous, in a world of flesh and blood ad executives and the Wrigley’s three-martini lunches with the broiled Great Lakes whitefish for $3.60.
Jim Warren, a former Tribune managing editor, is executive editor of NewsGuard.
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