Commentary
Rogue Political Marketers Infiltrate Media Ad Systems - Is TV Next?
- by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, October 26, 2018
Would they investing in Russian bots and troll farms in 2018? Is that the political media buy your company wants to handle?
The Justice Department says the proposed operating budget for Russian-backed advertising spend on mostly social media in 2018 alone was over $10 million.
Should someone kick that envelope full of cash back -- to a charity?
This money was overseen by Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, a Russian national who became the first person charged by the U.S. for conspiring to interfere in the 2018 midterm elections, according to the FBI and Justice Department.
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And she wasn't just complicit this year.
Khusyaynova is accused of overseeing a $35 million media budget from 2014 to 2018 that covered spending on activists, social media advertising and placing news postings on social networks.
But as far as anyone can tell, not traditional media advertising -- like TV. Still, who is to say, in future years, this would not be an easy way into the U.S. advertising market, especially with the rapid growth of programmatic/automated media buying.
President Trump says don’t worry, never happened — despite the evidence uncovered by Robert Mueller's investigation and 17 national intelligence agencies that insist Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Guessing he probably feels the same way about 2018.
Somewhat protecting TV networks from mischievous actors is TV’s limited TV inventory, which is still predominantly a manually handled process. Programmatic/automated efforts are nowhere near being fully incorporated into TV stations’ ad systems, either in local or national TV.
Wayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost. You can reach Wayne at wayne@mediapost.com.
Wayne, "programmatic" media buying as executed in digital media does not exist in other media---TV, radio or print, specifically. Even when "assisted" by computer tallies and paperwork shuffling, traditional media buys are all effected between humans and somebody is very likely to notice if the Russians or anybody else tries something. It's only when the whole process is automated---as often is the case with digital---that you need to really worry.
As a "media guy" I'm guessing that Wayne Friedman is aware of the brilliant television series The Americans, and its historical portrayal of the many devious and, quite frankly, MORE EFFECTIVE ways that Russians have infiltrated, influenced, coerced and even ASSASSINATED people over the decades. Now they have new digital toys (as do we, and if you DON'T think we're doing the same thing to them you really are addicted to Kool-Aid). To me, it's not so much that Trump is saying "don't worry, never happened." It's more that Trump is saying "don't worry, it's not that big a deal, we've got it over them in spades"... which is true.
Again, the left attempting to create nests of hornets. Kind of like the "science" around global warming. The left insists that Trump, and other conservatives are "denying science" by mitigating against the "hair on fire, end of the world" nonsense by the leftist likes of Al Gore (who predicted that "man-made" warming would have ended the world already).
Trump, and other very smart (if flawed, and broken) conservatives can read thermometers. There is ZERO denial that a warming is occurring. The science that the liberals ignore is that we've experienced warmings very much like this current one prior to the introduction of the automobile, and industrialization, and belching smokestacks across the planet. What conservatives are unsure of, rightfully so, and what liberals insist upon is that this warming is all our fault, and aren't we horrible? Not so fast. If warmings of similar degree(s) have occurred pre-Industrial-era (and they have, followed by coolings that normalized things once again) does it make sense for the United States to set itself back while other countries do nothing to stop something that may be occurring naturally?
Similarly, I'm supposed to go "hair on fire, the world is ending" over the Russians investing 7 mil annually in social media? Really? I'm not even on Facebook! If everybody else stops wasting their time there, and coming together for collective good, then that meager Russian "investment" will become even more meaningless.
Really, if anybody wants to individually do something that has been scientifically proven to mitigate against ozone depletion, START EATING SOME MEAT! The flatulence, and release of methane gas from still living cows is more culpable than emissions from cars, and factories. The left should cease with its "morally superior" veganism (plants good for ozone) and start diving into steaks to keep more cows from farting.