Nikolas “Niko” Carmello Sierra died on August 23, 2021. Though news coverage was minimal, if you google “Niko Sierra death,” you’ll find his actual obituary published twice—once on a Massachusetts funeral home’s website, and another on a news outlet’s obituary page.

You’ll also find one of the darker sides of the internet advertising economy: scraped and copied obituaries and tributes on sites like deaddeath.com and tragedyinfo.com.

• Others have more obscure titles, like dailywebpoint.com and daily5techtips.com. They cover people who’ve passed away, sometimes by using reports from local newspapers, changing words here and there, and then republishing as content. Some even go as far as embedding social posts about the deceased written by loved ones.
• These low-quality publishers suck up ad dollars via middle-men ad-tech vendors from brands like Nike, Nordstrom, Zola, Planned Parenthood, Burt’s Bees, and others, relying on search engines to direct people to them and get their clicks. These sites rely on people, whether they’re a close loved one or a former middle school classmate, searching for info about the death of a person like Sierra.
• “When you’re trying to elicit clicks from people, there’s only certain things people will click on,” Zach Edwards, founder of digital analytics firm Victory Medium, told Marketing Brew.

These scammy types of sites can skim marketing dollars from the likes of Nike and Zola simply because the ad-tech companies that serve the advertisements online, like Google and Taboola, have had policies that inadvertently allow it to happen.

“The reason this kind of inventory exists is to capture irrational and poorly managed ads,” Chris Kane, founder and president of Jounce Media, told us, explaining that publishers who post these kinds of obituaries “study those policies and say, ‘Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do to just barely squeak over the line of being acceptable to Google and to other exchanges.’”

Who writes ripped-off obituaries for these types of sites is murky, especially since most of the ones we reached out to didn’t respond. The two that did respond didn’t comment on their monetization strategy.

Quantity > quality

Some of these sites post a lot. According to a sitemap, deaddeath.com published 5,475 articles in August of 2021, and most (if not all) were obituaries. It’s a volume play.

“It’s just throwing as much spaghetti at the wall and hoping some of them stick, traffic-wise,” Tom Telford, managing director of search, social, and analytics at Clarity PR, told us. “SEO is about finding what users are searching.”

Since Marketing Brew started reporting this story and reaching out to the ad-tech firms that help monetize these sites, several have stopped working or no longer show ads. Click here to read the full story.—RB

Breaking: Capital One’s bankers can officially take a joke. Or at least its marketing department can? Despite recent news that influencers who post about Wall Street for a living sometimes make more money than their meme subjects, Capital One’s latest card announcement is dripping in influencer promos.

• On Thursday, Capital One debuted a travel rewards credit card called Venture X with the help of “travel-loving, adventure-seeking storytellers like Becca Tobin, Cody Rigsby, Shiona Turini, Cameran Eubanks,” Lauren Liss, managing vice president at Capital One, said in an emailed statement to Marketing Brew.
• Liss added that Capital One sent the influencers to “Destination X” in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is basically a creator playground with many a ’grammable photo opp.

The bank partnered with agency MullenLowe for the project, and each creator was compensated for their work.

Not just Capital One

Those creators have to get that cash from somewhere—and it’s not just Capital One that’s making it happen.

For instance, fintech company Current’s marketing division is “split into four teams: performance marketing, brand, communications, and influencer,” per a July 2021 eMarketer report. “The latter is still unusual among incumbent banks but is table stakes at other neobanks and some financial institutions such as Navy Federal Credit Union (NFCU),” the report continues.—PB

Starting today, you, reader, can nominate yourself for a new section called Coworking.

What’s Coworking? Well, we have nearly 200,000 readers from all facets of the industry. Some of you buy media, some of you write copy, some of you help marketers stay on top of TikTok trends. And we think you could all benefit from learning a bit more about one another—your jobs, interests, hot takes, and more.

You can fill out the nomination form here.

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Vintage Ad Browser

This 1962 Chrysler ad isn’t relevant at all to today’s issue—we just thought the trees looked pretty.