Nandini Jammi

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Nandini Jammi
Nandini Jammi on Stiftung Neue Verantwortung.jpg
Jammi in 2020
Born1988or1989(age 34–35) [1]
Hyderabad, India
Occupation(s)Activist and brand safety consultant
Known for Check My Ads, Sleeping Giants

Nandini Jammi (born 1988or1989 [1] ) is an American activist and brand safety consultant. She is a co-founder of the Check My Ads agency and associated non-profit Check My Ads Institute. Previously, she co-founded Sleeping Giants. [2] She informs businesses about their advertisements that appear on conservative websites that she describes as bad faith publishers—websites that publish misinformation or conspiracy theories, or engage in advertising fraud—and pressures them to stop supporting those publishers. [3]

Contents

Early life and education

Jammi immigrated to the United States from India as a child, and grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. She is from a Telugu family from Hyderabad and attended college at the University of Maryland, where she contributed to the college newspaper, The Diamondback . [4] [2]

Career and activism

Jammi began her career in marketing, initially working in Europe as a remote digital marketer. She subsequently joined a United Kingdom-based startup that built product management software, where she was solely responsible for the company's direct marketing. [2] She later became a freelance copywriter and marketing consultant, and lived in Berlin. [1]

Sleeping Giants (2016–2020)

Soon after the 2016 United States presidential election, Jammi visited the Breitbart News website and saw an Old Navy ad with a photograph of an interracial couple. She wrote a Medium post advocating for marketers to stop running ads with Breitbart. [2] She and Matt Rivitz, a copywriter who had just pushed for mortgage company SoFi to stop running ads on Breitbart, joined together to create the initially anonymous Sleeping Giants campaign in November 2016. [2] [5] In July 2018, The Daily Caller reported that Rivitz was behind the Sleeping Giants account. A New York Times profile published two days later revealed both Jammi and Rivitz. [2] [5]

Through Sleeping Giants, the two succeeded in getting hundreds of large brands to stop running ads on Breitbart. Breitbart's former executive chair, Steve Bannon, was captured on video in 2017 saying that the campaign caused Breitbart's advertising revenues to drop approximately 90%. [2] [6] Sleeping Giants also engaged in campaigns to pressure advertiser boycotts of other websites and individuals, including Tucker Carlson and Bill O'Reilly. [2] Jammi and Rivitz both continued to work at their day jobs while also spending between three and eight hours a day on Sleeping Giants. [1]

In July 2020, Jammi left Sleeping Giants, saying that Rivitz had tried to downplay her role in the organization. [2] [7] She published a blog post after leaving the organization, titled "I'm leaving Sleeping Giants, but not because I want to", with the subtitle: "How my white male co-founder gaslighted me out of the movement we built together". [7] Rivitz subsequently wrote a public apology. [2] By that time, Jammi said she had also begun to develop doubts about Sleeping Giants' approach. She felt the group was having a negative effect on the news industry as a whole, as companies began to shy away from advertising on any news outlets at all over fears their ads might be run alongside objectionable content. She also felt she was "playing Whac-A-Mole" by pressuring individual brands to stop advertising on specific platforms. [2]

Check My Ads (2020–present)

Jammi joined marketer Claire Atkin to continue her activism and research around advertising's enablement of publishers of fake news, far-right content, medical misinformation, and conspiracy theories. [3] In January 2020, they published their first issue of Branded, a newsletter where they describe their research into advertising technology (adtech) and problems they identify. In June 2020, Jammi and Atkin co-founded the Check My Ads consulting agency. [8] In October 2021, they co-founded the Check My Ads Institute, a non-profit group to focus on investigative research. Both will continue to work with the consulting agency while also working on the non-profit. [9]

Through their work with Check My Ads, Jammi and Atkin have reported on broad keyword blocklisting of words like "coronavirus", "racism", and "immigration", a practice they say has been detrimental to the news industry as a whole. They have reported on "dark pool sales houses", a phenomenon where a group of unrelated publishers share an ID on an ad exchange, leading to the group being misrepresented as a single entity. This has allowed publishers to circumvent blocks from ad exchanges, as well as illegitimately draw better cost per mille (CPM). [10] [11] [12] They have also reported on large American adtech companies, including Google and Criteo, placing advertisements on Russian-backed disinformation websites even after the websites had been sanctioned by the United States Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. [13]

Other activism and work

In 2021, Jammi and others pressured companies to stop running ads with The Post Millennial and other companies who employ the right-wing journalist Andy Ngo. [14] [15]

Jammi is on the advisory committee of Good Information Inc., a public-benefit corporation launched in October 2021 and led by Tara McGowan. The company aims to fund new media organizations and combat disinformation. [16]

Related Research Articles

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WPP plc is a British multinational communications, advertising, public relations, technology, and commerce holding company headquartered in London, England. It is the world's largest advertising company, as of 2023. WPP plc owns many companies, which include advertising, public relations, media, and market research networks such as AKQA, BCW, CMI Media Group, Essence Global, Finsbury, Grey, Hill+Knowlton Strategies, Mindshare, Ogilvy, Wavemaker, Wunderman Thompson, and VMLY&R. It is one of the "Big Four" agency companies, alongside Publicis, The Interpublic Group of Companies, and Omnicom Group. WPP has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange, and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.

Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising that uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. Online advertising includes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, many types of display advertising, and mobile advertising. Advertisements are increasingly being delivered via automated software systems operating across multiple websites, media services and platforms, known as programmatic advertising.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ogilvy (agency)</span> Advertising agency

Ogilvy is a New York City-based British advertising, marketing, and public relations agency. It was founded in 1850 by Edmund Mather as a London-based agency. In 1964, the firm became known as Ogilvy & Mather after merging with a New York City agency that was founded in 1948 by David Ogilvy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Super Bowl commercials</span> Television commercials during the Super Bowl

Super Bowl commercials, colloquially known as Super Bowl ads, are high-profile television commercials featured in the U.S. television broadcast of the Super Bowl, the championship game of the National Football League (NFL). Super Bowl commercials have become a cultural phenomenon of their own alongside the game itself, as many viewers only watch the game to see the commercials. Many Super Bowl advertisements have become well known because of their cinematographic quality, unpredictability, surreal humor, and use of special effects. The use of celebrity cameos has also been common in Super Bowl ads. Some commercials airing during, or proposed to air during the game, have also attracted controversy due to the nature of their content.

<i>Adweek</i> Weekly American advertising trade publication

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The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) is a British non-profit organisation with offices in London and Washington, D.C. that works to stop the spread of online hate speech and disinformation. It campaigns to deplatform people that it believes promote hate or misinformation, and campaigns to restrict media organisations such as The Daily Wire from advertising. CCDH is a member of the Stop Hate For Profit coalition.

<i>Breitbart News</i> American far-right news and opinion website

Breitbart News Network is an American far-right syndicated news, opinion, and commentary website founded in mid-2007 by American conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart. Its content has been described as misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist by academics and journalists. The site has published a number of conspiracy theories and intentionally misleading stories. Posts originating from the Breitbart News Facebook page are among the most widely shared political content on Facebook.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Realtor.com</span> Real estate website

Realtor.com is a real estate listings website operated by the News Corp subsidiary Move, Inc. and based in Santa Clara, California. It is the second most visited real estate listings website in the United States as of 2021, with over 100 million monthly active users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adland</span> Advertising industry website

Adland is a website focusing on the advertising industry and an Internet archive of commercials. Adland incorporates advertising news, critical commentary on ads and the advertising industry, and archives of ads and ad campaigns, concentrating on television advertisements. In 2003, Variety described Adland as a "center for ad-related news and discussion." The website also hosts ads which have been banned or censored elsewhere. Adland is headquartered in Malta, though coverage is international. Adland also has a Twitter presence with nearly 150,000 followers. On September 19, 2019, the website completely moved out of web server host Vultr due to a copyright infringement situation regarding a Bridgestone commercial. Since January 2020, the website is currently active again with a completely different web server host.

Real-time bidding (RTB) is a means by which advertising inventory is bought and sold on a per-impression basis, via instantaneous programmatic auction, similar to financial markets. With real-time bidding, advertising buyers bid on an impression and, if the bid is won, the buyer's ad is instantly displayed on the publisher's site. Real-time bidding lets advertisers manage and optimize ads from multiple ad-networks, allowing them to create and launch advertising campaigns, prioritize networks, and allocate percentages of unsold inventory, known as backfill.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sleeping Giants</span> Social media activism organization

Sleeping Giants is a social media activism organization aiming to pressure companies into removing advertisements from several conservative news outlets by publicly accusing them of malpractices such as misinformation and hate speech. The campaign started in November 2016, shortly after Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 United States presidential election, with the launch of a Twitter account aiming to boycott Breitbart News. The campaign has sections in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France and Germany.

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Siltanen & Partners is an American advertising agency, located in El Segundo, California. Which was founded by Rob Siltanen in 1999, following his departure from TBWA\Chiat\Day.

IAG Research was a media-measurement company founded in 1999 in New York City by Alan Gould, Ken Orkin and Eric Gould. IAG conducted research with viewers to measure the effectiveness of advertising and program engagement across television and the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Check My Ads</span> Brand safety non-profit

The Check My Ads Institute is an organization founded by Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin. The Check My Ads Institute is a non-profit advertising watchdog organization created in October 2021, which aims to do deeper investigative research into the advertising technology industry. Jammi and Atkin also publish a newsletter called Branded. The Check My Ads Agency was a brand safety and marketing consultancy that Atkin and Jammi founded in 2020. As of February 2023, the Check My Ads Agency is no longer active.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Maheshwari, Sapna (July 20, 2018). "Revealed: The People Behind an Anti-Breitbart Twitter Account". The New York Times . ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Edelman, Gilad (August 13, 2020). "She Helped Wreck the News Business. Here's Her Plan to Fix It". Wired . ISSN   1059-1028 . Retrieved November 5, 2021.
  3. 1 2 Lundstrom, Kathryn (August 13, 2020). "Sleeping Giants Co-Founder Launches Check My Ads". Adweek . Retrieved November 5, 2021.
  4. ↑ Varma, Uttara (July 19, 2020). "Calling out bigotry, sexism". The Times of India .
  5. 1 2 Rajagopalan, Megha (July 8, 2020). "The Leaders Of Sleeping Giants Are Splitting Over A Dispute On Credit And Titles". BuzzFeed News . Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  6. ↑ Embury-Dennis, Tom (April 4, 2019). "Steve Bannon caught admitting Breitbart lost 90% of advertising revenue due to boycott" . The Independent . Archived from the original on June 18, 2022. Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  7. 1 2 Rajagopalan, Meghan (July 8, 2020). "The Leaders Of Sleeping Giants Are Splitting Over A Dispute On Credit And Titles". BuzzFeed News . Retrieved November 5, 2021.
  8. ↑ Lundstrom, Kathryn (August 13, 2020). "Sleeping Giants Co-Founder Launches Check My Ads". Adweek . Retrieved November 5, 2021.
  9. ↑ Barwick, Ryan (October 27, 2021). "Disinformation and ad-tech activists Check My Ads are starting a nonprofit". Morning Brew . Retrieved November 5, 2021.
  10. ↑ Barwick, Ryan (October 27, 2021). "Disinformation and ad-tech activists Check My Ads are starting a nonprofit". Morning Brew . Retrieved November 5, 2021.
  11. ↑ Stenberg, Mark; Shields, Ronan (September 29, 2021). "What Marketers Need to Know About IAB's Latest Crackdown". Adweek . Retrieved November 5, 2021.
  12. ↑ Stenberg, Mark (September 9, 2021). "What You Need to Know About Dark Pool Sales Houses". Adweek . Retrieved November 5, 2021.
  13. ↑ Blustein, Andrew (May 17, 2021). "How Ad Tech Wound Up Monetizing Sanctioned Russian Websites". Adweek . Retrieved November 5, 2021.
  14. ↑ Goforth, Claire (September 16, 2021). "The Post Millennial is hemorrhaging advertisers because it employs Andy Ngo". The Daily Dot . Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  15. ↑ Goforth, Claire (October 1, 2021). "Advertisers keep dropping the Post Millennial for employing Andy Ngo". The Daily Dot . Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  16. ↑ Fischer, Sara (October 26, 2021). "Exclusive: Billionaires back new media firm to combat disinformation". Axios . Retrieved November 5, 2021.
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