Major brands are still running ads on “Stop the Steal” sites

Someone get the Tums—advertisers were (and still are) funding many of the publishers fomenting “Stop the Steal,” according to a new report from NewsGuard, a company that works with advertisers and media agencies to vet publishers.

Advertisers including AT&T, Kia, Honda, Mastercard, Kohl’s, Pottery Barn, Logitech, and Blue Cross Blue Shield have run programmatic advertisements on sites like the Federalist or ZeroHedge that have published content like “Yes, Biden Is Hiding His Plan to Rig The 2022 Midterm Elections,” NewsGuard found.

• So did government entities like the CDC, the Department of Veteran Affairs, and HealthCare.gov.
• When Marketing Brew went to look at that specific article, we saw display advertising from Amazon and Pottery Barn.
• Other publishers shared with Marketing Brew include One American News Network and lesser-known sites like 100%fedup.com and greatgameindia.com.

In total, NewsGuard reported that in the past year, some 1,975 brands have advertised across 166 publishers that it flagged for “publishing falsehoods and conspiracy theories about the election,” something that it began tracking during the 2020 presidential election.

How? These ads were served programmatically, meaning they are often targeted to a specific user or audience and largely agnostic to the publisher they’re running on. Some ways that advertisers can try to combat this is by using blocklists (which is how NewsGuard makes money) or by working with an adtech company like DoubleVerify, which claims it can block keywords advertisers might want to avoid, like “election fraud.”

Despite these efforts, advertisers are still, often inadvertently, funding these publishers.

“Many brands may think that because this is a problem that is across the industry, that they’re not going to be held specifically accountable. I think public opinion is way ahead of brands in this regard,” Gordon Crovitz, co-founder of NewsGuard, told Marketing Brew.

+1: Last August, we reported on a similar NewsGuard report that found that advertisers were spending billions on misinformation sites, accounting for roughly 1.68% of all display ad spend.