Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Let's not overlook one splashy announcement at NYC Advertising Week last week, which might be highly significant or the adtech space -- or might not.

The Weather Company's back story is intriguing, and in many ways emblematic of the data-driven marketing and advertising environment which surrounds us. Offering personalized meteorological updates, especially via a popular mobile app, put TWC in a position to aggregate an enormous set of first-party data, and — of course — location data. Swifty, a weather company became an adtech company, and a powerful one.In partnership with IBM, it launched a series of initiatives — for example, JOURNEYfx, a platform for first-party data-based location targeting.

Last week, IBM Watson entered the picture with the re-branding of TWC as IBM Watson Advertising. This not only acknowledges TWC's central mission — using data to power campaigns — but also signals the use of AI to analyse and optimize these vast tracts of customer information: some 25 billion data transactions per day....

As a result of such “programmatic” buying, advertisers often are in the dark about where their ads end up. Advertisers can opt out of certain sites, of course, but only if they affirmatively place them on a blacklist of sites.

So when an ad appears on Breitbart, Sleeping Giants or one of its 109,000 Twitter followers and 35,000 Facebook followers flag the advertiser, often accompanied by an image of the sponsors’ ad next to a Breitbart story.

The other day, for example, a Sleeping Giants follower tweeted at Country Inns, informing the hotel chain that it was advertising on “the racist Breitbart site.” Within a day, the company tweeted back: “Thank you for your concern. . . . We have added Breitbart to our blacklist of ads.”

This apparently happens a lot. Sleeping Giants’ database lists nearly 2,900 companies that have declared Breitbart off limits since November — an astonishing figure, though one hard to confirm because some ad buys recur. Nevertheless, it’s not an implausible number. During one 24-hour period, advertisers such as the air-conditioning manufacturer Rheem, transport operator Caltrain, Sutter Health Plus and Rose Medical Center of Denver all publicly acknowledged that they had blacklisted Breitbart in response to a Sleeping Giants tweet....