Advertising Will Save Us from Disinformation, with Co-Founder of Check My Ads Claire Atkin

Can advertising’s immense power to change behaviour be used for good? In this brand new podcast, produced by Intelligence Squared, Myra Nussbaum, President and Chief Creative Officer at Havas Chicago and Dan Lucey, Chief Creative Officer at Havas New York, talk to the people who are harnessing the power of advertising to help people and the planet.

This week, Dan and Myra were joined by the Co-Founder of Check My Ads, Claire Atkin. Check My Ads Institute is a non-profit advertising watchdog organisation that aims to stop disinformation by cutting off its lifeline: advertising revenue. Claire shares how Check My Ads was initially an agency working with advertisers but, after realising that advertisers were not the problem, it turned its attention to the $400bn ad exchange industry that she believes is destabilising the information ecosystem.

As adtech’s "first watchdog", Claire describes how they expose the tactics that adtech companies use to push advertiser dollars towards hate and disinformation outlets, holding them accountable to their clients and to the public. She also talks about Check My Ads’ latest campaign, which aims to defund “the biggest voices in election fraud disinformation” and targeted Fox News, for its role in the January 6th insurrection.

Claire co-founded Check My Ads in 2021 along with Nandini Jammi. Prior to this, she had spent years building a career in tech marketing, predominantly for software-as-a-service companies. In 2017, increasingly concerned about the ways that the marketing industry was undermining democracy, she went to study International Election Observation at the Global Campus for Human Rights in Venice, and from there became increasingly determined to do something to take on the disinformation economy.

—

We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be. 

Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2. 

And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.

Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices