There’s a lot going on in the world, so I won’t blame you for perhaps not having fully digested a Reuters report late last year that showed Meta has been raking in significant revenue (around $3 billion!) from Chinese “resellers” who are essentially running a global shell game, as reported by Reuters. These are highly sophisticated operations, allegedly with ties to the state, using the platform to push everything from scams to misinformation.
And while marketers spend months agonizing over a 0.5% shift in brand equity or whether a video spot has the “right” color grade, we are still, as an industry, collectively looking the other way when billions of dollars in ad spend are effectively being set on fire.
This isn’t just another “tech platform has a glitch” story, but a systemic, multibillion-dollar rot. And it makes clear where we (advertisers, agencies, marketers) stand in the pecking order of Silicon Valley’s priorities.
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That fraud happens is not surprising. But that it is not addressed — in this case by Meta — because of the negative impact it would have on the company’s bottom line, is astonishing and very sad. It’s the classic “don’t ask, don’t tell” of the digital ecosystem. If the numbers look good in the quarterly business review, nobody wants to pull the thread that unravels the whole sweater.
But let’s be honest: As a marketing leader, you can’t afford to be the emperor without clothes.
When fraud of this scale is tolerated, it…
