Gannett gave advertisers wrong information for nine months

US publisher Gannett has acknowledged that it, unintentionally, provided the wrong information to advertisers buying space through real-time auctions for a nine-month period starting in May last year.

What happened 

An error in its ad systems, only fixed within the last week, means that many ads may have been placed in front of audiences other than the ones they were intended for, the Wall Street Journal reports. 

Examples of misplacement

• Advertisers were told an article was about the viral game Wordle when it was actually about bear cubs in Pennsylvania.
• Advertisers thought they were buying ads on the website of Florida’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune but the ads actually ran on the website of New Mexico’s Ruidoso News. 
• A reader of the Indianapolis Star was wrongly represented as a visitor to the USA Today website: an advertiser seeking to target a national audience might have just reached people in Indiana.

Why it matters

The digital ad tech marketplace is incredibly complex and advertisers often have to effectively take on trust what they’re being told. Media buyers have no way of knowing that, as happened in this case, that the “bid request” data supplied was inaccurate.

Braedon Vickers, the ad industry researcher who discovered the discrepancies, nails the problem: “Programmatic advertising relies on a lot of data being self-reported by those selling the ads. That this issue went undetected for so long suggests that the processes in place to verify this information are not sufficient.”

Sourced from Wall Street Journal [Image: wikipedia]