What is “dark advertising” and how prevalent is it?

Once upon a time, most advertisements were public. If we wanted to see what advertisers were doing, we could easily find it – on TV, in newspapers and magazines, and on billboards all over town.

This meant that governments, civil society and citizens could control advertisers, especially when they advertised products that could be harmful, such as alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pharmaceuticals, financial services or unhealthy foods.

However, the rise of online advertisements has led to a kind of “dark advertising”. Ads are often only visible to the targets they are intended for, they disappear moments after being seen, and no one except the platforms knows how, when, where and why the ads appear.

In a new study conducted for the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education (FARE), we audited the advertising transparency of seven major digital platforms. The results were grim: neither platform is transparent enough for the public to understand what ad they are posting and how it is targeted.

Why is transparency important?

Dark ads on digital platforms shape public life. They have been used to spread political lies, target racial groups and perpetuate gender bias.

Dark advertising on digital platforms is also a problem when it comes to addictive and harmful products such as alcohol, gambling and unhealthy foods.

In a recent study with VicHealth, we found that age-restricted products, such as alcohol and gambling, were targeted to people under 18 on digital platforms. Currently, however, there is no way to systematically monitor the types of alcohol and gambling advertisements that children see.

Ads are optimized to drive engagement, such as through clicks or purchases, and target those most likely to engage. For example, people identified as heavy drinkers are likely to receive more alcohol advertisements.

This optimization can have extreme results. A study by the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education (FARE) and the Cancer Council WA found that a user received 107 advertisements for alcoholic products on Facebook and Instagram in a single hour on a Friday evening in April 2020.

How transparent is advertising on digital platforms?

We assessed the transparency of advertising across major digital platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok – by asking the following nine questions:

• Is there a complete and permanent archive of all ads published on the platform?
• Is the archive accessible using an application programming interface (API)?
• Is there a public dashboard that can be consulted and updated in real time?
• Are announcements permanently stored in the archives?
• Can I access deleted advertisements?
• Can we download advertisements for analysis?
• Can we see what types of users the ad was targeting?
• How much did the advertisement cost?
• Can we say how many people the ad has reached?

Not all platforms included in our assessment met basic transparency criteria, which means that advertising on the platform is not observable by civil society, researchers or regulators. Most of the time, advertising can only be seen by its targets.

Notably, TikTok had no transparency measures to allow observation of advertising on the platform.

Advertising transparency on these major digital platforms leaves a lot to be desired. Excerpt from “Ads on digital platforms: how transparent and observable are they?”, provided by the author

Other platforms weren’t much better, none offering a full or permanent ad archive. This means that once an ad campaign is over, there is no way to observe which ads have been shown.

Facebook and Instagram are the only platforms to publish a list of all currently active advertisements. However, most of these ads are removed once the campaign is inactive and are no longer observable.

The platforms also fail to provide contextual information for ads, such as ad spend and reach, or how ads are targeted.

Without this information, it is difficult to understand who is being advertised on these platforms. For example, we cannot be sure that companies selling harmful and addictive products are not targeting children or people recovering from addiction. Platforms and advertisers simply ask us to trust them.

We found that platforms were starting to provide information about a narrowly defined category of advertising: “issues, elections or politics”. This shows that there is no technical reason to withhold information about other types of advertising from the public. On the contrary, the platforms choose to keep it secret.

Put the ad back in public view

When digital advertising can be systematically monitored, it will be possible to hold digital platforms and marketers accountable for their business practices.

Our assessment of advertising transparency on digital platforms demonstrates that they are currently not observable or accountable to the public. Consumers, civil society, regulators and even advertisers all have an interest in ensuring a better public understanding of how digital platforms’ dark advertising models work.

The limited steps platforms have taken to create public records, particularly in the case of political advertising, demonstrate that change is possible. And the detailed advertising performance dashboards they offer advertisers show that there are no technical barriers to accountability.

Nicholas Carah, Associate Professor of Digital Media, University of Queensland; Aimee Brownbill, Honorary Fellow, Public Health, University of Queensland; Amy Shields Dobson, Lecturer in Digital and Social Media, Curtin University; Brady Robards, Associate Professor of Sociology, Monash University; Daniel Angus, Professor of Digital Communication, Queensland University of Technology; Kiah Hawker, Associate Researcher, Digital Media, University of Queensland; Lauren Hayden, PhD Candidate and Research Assistant, University of Queensland, and Xue Ying Tan, Software Engineer, Center for Digital Media Research, Queensland University of Technology.

This article is republished from The conversation under Creative Commons license. Read the original article.