Vodafone to block its ads from appearing next to 'fake news' Vodafone will block its advertising appearing against so-called "fake news" and hate speech from today. It said the decision was a response to evolving technology within advertising and media and the algorithms being used in ad placements. It said that it will use "whitelisting" controls put in place by its global ad agency, …
I've been with Vodaphone since 2011/12, they had good coverage in my area at the time SW, and good coverage in the area I live in now, SE.
Coverage was a little dodgy when I was in the NE, but it improved.
Recent trips to Wales, the Peak District and other out of the way places showed that, at least for where I was, the coverage was far better than the 3, EE and O2 networked phones other members of my family were using, and I lost coverage only once, when down a narrow, twisting valley where no phone coverage could reach. When leaving, my phone was on the network (and I was making a call) long before my Father's phone had reconnected to his network.
I'm sure there are still deadspots around for Vodaphone, as there will be for all carriers, but I haven't found them lacking myself.
If Vodaphone are able to work out what is fake news and what isn't with an algorithm, I think Google and FB would quite like that algorithm so they can apply it to all their advertising in the first place.
This does of course require Vodaphone being either more adept than Google with their algorithms or really unspeakably lucky.
Their reference to an algorithm is probably just technobabble. The real piece of information in the article is that WPP is offering an online whitelist service for advertising. WPP is an umbrella corporation that owns dozens of large advertising agencies, including Ogilvy, Grey, Y&R, J Walter Thompson and many others.
This will probably be the next big thing in advertising. Controlling not just the content of the ad, but the context of the ad too.
I guess WPP is offering a whitelisting service of some description - that doesn't require much computational grunt - a few mechanical turks can do the donkey work - This is what JP Morgan did.
For Voda, this is merely an attempt to return to status quo ante.
Until the advent of www. or, to be more precise, Google, advertisers - via their agencies - always controlled the context of their advertising. They can still do this on the internet if they trade directly with publishers and other reputable content providers.
It's a different story when advertisers prioritise performance at the expense of brand safety. Programmatic ad tech is filled with cowboys; search engine marketing will get you into trouble one day, no matter how hard Google tries to clean this act up; and syndication - Taboola / Outbrain - is an enormous cesspit.
... they look at the top 100(00) sites their ads are already shown on manually, and then whitelist those which seem to be OK. That's feasible for any ad company.
If you have a business model based on selling ad spots, that puts you in a difficult situation. Unless you are already among the top sites you'll never be able to run any ads and therefore have no or less income.
If an advertising agency placed a Vodafone advert next to a Daily Mail article about mobile phones causing cancer, you'd soon find the advertising agency dropped. You do get some level of control about what your adverts are placed with. That's all that Vodafone appear to be trying to do - hence the whitelist rather than a blacklist.
The usage of 'fake news' seems to vary wildly between 'bus found on the moon' and 'that headline was a bit shouty', and anything insufficiently pedant-checked in between.
It always used to be by proxy anyway, e.g. let someone who is not the official spokesperson say something that everyone understands but might not be literally true, then have the official spokesperson deny that the literal version was ever policy.
See also mischaracterisation of remarks, or misleading headlines like the ones we've had for donkey's years, now it's all 'fake news', a phrase surely now in a 'top ten unhelpful descriptions' list.
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