I had the hearing feed running in one window and a 2018 media plan open in the other, which turned out to be the correct way to watch it.
Over October 31 and November 1, general counsel from Facebook, Twitter and Google sat in front of Senate and House intelligence committees and answered questions about Russian-purchased advertising and the organic content around it. The numbers moved as the days went on. Facebook ended up telling Congress the content may have reached 126 million Americans.
Underneath the numbers, the two days were an argument about a noun. Senators wanted to know what these companies are. Every lawyer at that table declined the word publisher, declined the word media, and offered technology company and platform instead.
A company that refuses the word publisher is telling you, in advance, that it will not take responsibility for what runs beside your ad.
This is not a civics question for us. It is a procurement question. Media companies carry a specific obligation: somebody decides what appears, and that somebody can be called and yelled at and made to answer. A neutral pipe carries no such obligation, and a neutral pipe is what all three of them said they were, under oath, for two days.
We already ran the test this year. In March, advertisers pulled money out of YouTube because their spots were landing against extremist video. What came back was tooling. Exclusion lists, category filters, better dashboards, more controls handed to the buyer. Notice the shape of that answer. The responsibility was not accepted, it was subcontracted to you, in the form of settings you now have to maintain.
So three questions for whoever owns your 2018 plan. One, which line items assume a publisher exists on the other end, and what happens to those line items when nobody claims the role. Two, when your spot appears somewhere ugly, who is accountable, by name, and is that name in a contract or only in a deck. Three, is your exclusion list a strategy or a chore somebody does in December.
The responsibility was not accepted, it was subcontracted to you, in the form of settings you now have to maintain.
None of this means stop buying. The audience is there and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It means pricing the risk honestly instead of treating reach as though it came with the protections the old channels had. You are renting inventory from landlords who have now testified that they do not inspect the building.
I walked down to Stumptown afterward in the kind of rain that does not commit, thinking about how many brand safety conversations I have sat in where everyone agreed the platforms would eventually be made to answer for this. They spent two days in Washington explaining, politely and at length, that they will not.