Claire Atkin

My name is Claire Atkin, and I am the CEO of Check My Ads.

We're the digital advertising watchdog.

At the highest level, we keep you safe from lies, scams, and manipulation on the internet.

We work on behalf of regular citizens, but also publishers, especially publishers of the news, and advertisers who often don't know where their ads are going.

Yeah, we were in the ecosystem.

We were building marketing funnels on behalf of software companies.

And we started asking questions like, you know, why are all the tools that I'm using to sell software being used to radicalize people or spread lies?

I met my business partner in 2019 after she had run a very public social media campaign called Sleeping Giants, which had taken 90% of Breitbart's ad revenue away because advertisers hadn't known that they were funding Breitbart.com.

When they found out, they left.

Breitbart lost 90% of the $8 million that they were planning to make in 2017.

And then three years later, when I met her, we were asking each other, why isn't this problem solved?

And since then, it's just been open door after open door.

We've just figured out more and more issues inside the Internet.

And we've also figured out a lot of ways of trying to solve them.

This industry, the ad system, even though it's trafficking in, I don't know, nearly a trillion dollars in USD every year, it is not regulated like a stock market.

And we think it could be.

It could have, for instance, know your customer laws where the advertisers know who they're working with along the way for the ad to get to the website.

It could also have transparency laws where the advertisers know exactly where their ads have gone and get a report hourly.

or daily at the very least.

We also think there should be a regulatory environment where someone is keeping track of this, kind of an SEC for digital advertising.