Creating healthy incentives.

Creating healthy incentives involves addressing the critical implications for information ecosystem integrity resulting from current business models, which depend on targeted advertising and other forms of content monetization as the dominant means of revenue generation. These models have provided unprecedented growth opportunities for businesses of all sizes, foremost the technology companies that own and operate digital platforms, and have given rise to a creator economy powered by and benefiting countless people. These models have also enabled financial incentives and opportunities for purveyors of disinformation and hate who exploit the attention economy in which technology companies track user behaviour to collect data, feeding algorithms that prioritize engagement in a bid to maximize potential revenue for advertisers and creators. Messaging designed to polarize and produce strong emotions is often that which generates the most engagement, with the result that algorithms have led to rewarding and amplifying harmful content. 

Actors exploiting these business models include information manipulators and mainstream public relations firms contracted by States, political figures and private sector entities to provide orchestrated manipulation campaigns, at times transnationally. The technology sector has designed digital advertising processes to be complex and opaque with minimal human oversight. This is advantageous to many actors in the advertising technology (ad tech) supply chain, with large technology companies profiting most of all.

Such opaque design can lead to advertising budgets inadvertently funding individuals, entities or ideas that advertisers might not have intended to support, which can constitute a material risk for brands. These advertisement placements can also negatively impact advertising campaign effectiveness and brand safety. The handful of companies who dominate ad tech are at the same time responsible for implementing advertising standards on the platforms that they own, where enforcement of such standards can be patchy and inconsistent. Such erosion of information ecosystem integrity highlights the need for a fundamental shift in incentive structures. This can happen through business models guided by human rights and that do not rely on algorithm-driven targeted programmatic advertising that is based on behavioural tracking and personal data. Advertisers can benefit the information ecosystem in a way that both strengthens information integrity and makes good business sense. While technology companies are unlikely to readily abandon current business models, healthier incentives can be achieved through greater transparency for advertisers into advertising processes and the adherence to human-rights responsible advertising policies by advert deliverers. By gaining more control of a transparent supply chain, advertisers can also see a better return on their investment.