The biggest change to online advertising will come when outsiders get a glimpse of how web monetization works, push back, and are forced to change as a public service.
For example, in 2011, Max Schrems was a law student studying abroad for a semester at Santa Clara University in California, near Facebook's Menlo Park offices. One of his Facebook privacy lawyers was invited to speak to the class, and Schrems was shocked by the man's lack of understanding of European privacy law. Currently, a Schrems-led lawsuit has invalidated multiple data-sharing agreements between the United States and Europe.
And then there's the California Consumer Privacy Act. It's the result of a ballot initiative backed by real estate agent Alastair McTaggart, who says he became a privacy advocate after a Google engineer mentioned online ad tracking to him in a passing conversation.
It's a long way to introduce Adalytics, an online advertising transparency technology startup founded in 2020.
Its founder, Krzysztof Franaszek (nicknamed “Chris”), is a computational biology-trained researcher involved in the fusion of data science and medical information. He taps into a sea of available data, from log files and campaign information held by brands, publishers, agencies, and ad tech systems to public data that anyone with JavaScript experience can parse from his web pages. I was attracted to his technique.
Franaszek also discussed how ads helped spread misinformation during the 2020 US election, and how ads for completely off-base businesses, such as luxury homes on the continent he had never visited, Franaszek told the press conference that he was also shaken by his personal experience of being provided with such services. A panel hosted by Chalice Custom Algorithms last October.
question – “Why did I see this ad? ” – He eventually led Franaszek to launch Adalytics, which went on to roll out a series of blockbuster advertising technologies.
company
Adlytics is a small business. Franaszek has only one full-time employee and no investors. It can't get any smaller.
To solve difficult engineering challenges, Franaszek told AdExchanger that he sometimes works with part-time staff and people with hands-on experience in ad tech.
But one thing Adalytics didn't need was a sales team to get its name out there.
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The company is now well known for its research. In many cases, the result of several months of investigation is a report that is, no joke, hundreds of pages long.
Most people probably think of Adalytics. teeth Research company.
But that's not the case.
Although Adalytics does research, it is essentially a software analytics solution built for brands and ad buyers.
Advertiser provides Adalytics with read-only access to its advertising system account. Pro bono offers include his one-time general offer based on analysis of data, such as how much brands have spent on his MFA site over the past year and how much ad dollars have been spent on sites on his exclusion list. Contains reports.
Users pay a fee to unlock specific information about which technology vendors, publishers, and campaigns inappropriately served their ads.
Adalytics itself is built on Snowflake. That IP can be used to run Snowflake queries against large datasets assembled from log files, transformed data from a client's CRM or CDP, commercial data, and public information via site crawlers or browser embeds. A set of algorithms used.
Adalytics focuses its reporting on individual topics such as the Google Search Partner Network and IAB Europe's Transparency and Consent Framework, but also provides traditional marketing analytics such as ROAS measurement.
controversy
In terms of its business model, Adalytics is a small group of freemium ad analytics tools, and it's not the first of its kind. So what's the big deal?
Importantly, Adalytics publishes attention-grabbing reports that drive new customers to their business.
Recently, Adalytics has had a series of hits on Google. One report accuses YouTube of misrepresenting its TrueView video placements, another accuses YouTube of serving personalized ads to children, and his third report accuses Google of misrepresenting its TrueView video placements. We've explored the darkest and worst parts of the search partner network.
But prior to these three Google revelations, Adlytics incorrectly identified ads served on small local newspaper sites in Gannett's 2022 advertising report as being served on its flagship site, USA Today. I discovered an error in labeling the text. Yahoo, Magnite, Index Exchange, consumer data intermediaries, and other digital media platforms have all been subject to unsavory investigations by Adalytics.
But Google initially pushed back against what it called an apparent conflict of interest in that Adalytics' reports serve as a content marketing and customer discovery tool for Adalytics' business.
Last November, on the day Adalytics released a damning report about its search ad network, a Google spokesperson told AdExchanger on background that “Adalytics operates with intent.”
A Google executive said of Adalytics, “They are a for-profit company that seeks to make money by voicing concerns to advertisers about their advertising products.” “The company’s business interest is in creating mistrust and attracting attention, even with flawed or inaccurate reporting.”
However, Google has provided only flimsy evidence for claims that the reports produced by Adalytics are flawed or incorrect.
One reason for the power and resonance of these reports is that they are independently corroborated. Reporters and industry participants are encouraged to fact-check the results and reproduce the scenarios presented by Adalytics in the study.
collaborators
Speaking of fact-checking, Adalytics also earns Google's ire. That's because the startup has a network of supporters and collaborators who shamelessly disparage Google.
For example, Franaszek spoke at the Ad Week event last October (adjacent to Ad Week), hosted by Chalice, a startup co-founded by Adam Heimlich, a prominent party member in the debate over Google's antitrust allegations. was a panelist. The panel discussion was moderated by Lou Pascalis, another vocal opponent of Google.
Heimlich, Pascalis, and other Google villains (including agency and ad tech executives who benefit from advertisers spending less on Google) are joined by background and field experts to help publish the Adalytics report. My name is on the family register.
outsider
One agency buyer who works with Adalytics and provides data and feedback for the report said Franaszek is not providing information specifically for Google.
Rather, Adalytics focuses on opaque advertising products and has a track record of delivering real hits. Google operates the largest and least transparent advertising platform, followed by Meta and Amazon.
Another ad tech collaborator at Adalytics said Franaszek is concerned about the web of competitive tensions that exist between Google and the agencies, advertisers and ad tech experts who provide data and expertise to Adalytics. He says he hasn't.
If the same agency and ad tech executives tried to collaborate on a similar report, it would likely fail, the same people said. Agencies don't easily share information, especially when it's so bad that they necessarily have to include raw log files and user data.
However, Adalytics can slip into this complex relationship without much care. As an outsider to the industry, Franaszek doesn't abide by the same unspoken rules as other ad tech researchers. Adalytics is also isolated because it only works with brand marketers, and they aren't worried about the tech companies getting hurt if Adalytics can get refunds for their campaigns.
This is also a key difference between the Adalytics report and, for example, the ANA Transparency Report, the latter half of which was published in December.
Because ANA relies on advertisers and platforms to share their data, ANA does not and cannot name specific vendors, media sellers, or data sources. ANA is often bound by her NDA and restricted to server data.
However, when Adalytics cited Procter & Gamble ads appearing in inappropriate Google search partner inventory, the company had not discovered those placements as a P&G vendor. By prompting and observing their arrangement, we proved that their arrangement could exist. He doesn't need an NDA to take screenshots.
This is important, as most advertising analytics services rely on data within a brand's log files and servers, but it's not the whole story. When an ad runs in an inappropriate placement and the advertiser is not charged or placement-level data is not revealed, the open source intelligence (OSINT) tactics employed by Adalytics can solve the problem. That's the only way to prove it, Franaszek said.
A consumer brand marketer at a Fortune 500 company said these findings are an eye-opener for buyers.
It's like having only ever eaten fish sticks, he says, and then someone “shows you a can of worms and how it guts the fish.”
And there are other ways in which Adalytics ignores the etiquette that exists among those in the advertising industry.
According to multiple Googlers who have complained to AdExchanger about this issue, Adalytics is a company that publishes anything before reporters or most industry researchers publish it. We did not provide a copy of the report to Google prior to release, as we do.
However, in reality, fact-checking or soliciting comments upfront does not necessarily make a report more factual. And while Adalytics risks atrophying its own work, it's powerful because people can recreate the results themselves. It's one thing to encourage someone to post an ad on an illegal, dangerous, or downright pornographic site; it's another to be able to do it yourself.
With a little care, Google will be able to fix the issues uncovered by Adalytics, and then the reports will come flooding in.
Over the weekend before Adalytics withdrew its report on Google's search network in November, reporters followed up for independent fact-checking and found that several illegal sites had indeed disappeared from the network as Google became aware of the problem. Ta.
future
Franaszek told AdExchanger that he has no animosity towards the company, despite three Google-focused reports spotlighting Adalytics last year. He is not involved in any future reporting on the Adalytics document.
Part of the plan is to grow Adalytics into a more fully-fledged analytics startup.
Franashek said he plans to grow the company, including hiring what he calls a “customer success” person who can also help educate customers.
When asked if he plans to continue to focus on advertising or go back to meaningless things like biomedical research (lol), Franaszek said that many advertisers still need the service. I answered that I was.
Because programmatic never stops being programmatic.
For example, at the same Chalice event referenced above, when Franaszek spoke on stage about “orthogonal” data signals and OSINT collection as a way to expose gaps in ad server and log file data, his voice sounded like He was beaten up by the men in the crowd. They discussed some previously unrelated details of his DSP among themselves. (At one point, Pascalis stood up and made himself a drink, clearly annoyed by the audience.)
So if you can bet on anything in this world, it's that the data-driven advertising industry will continue to require transparency reporting.
But despite its notoriety and growth plans, Adalytics hasn't made any investments or made any major changes to the way it operates, other than adding new branded customers. But no one knows what the future holds.
“Adalytics is moving closer to what VCs are always talking about,” Franaszek told AdExchanger.
