FILM RELEASE: ‘The Australian Ad Observatory: A web of invisible influence’
Author ADM+S Centre
Date 28 November 2024
“Digital platforms play a critical role in Australia’s economy and society. Yet our capacities to understand and observe their activities is very limited. Australian’s see hundreds of ads a day, but who’s taking note of what they’re seeing?” – Dr Abdul Karim Obeid, Data Engineer on The Australian Ad Observatory
On 28 November 2024 the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society released ‘The Australian Ad Observatory: A web of invisible influence’, the second iteration in a series of project films offering an inside look at major research projects underway at the Centre.
The first phase of the Ad Observatory pioneered a way to observe the targeting of social media advertising across populations of users. With 1,909 participants, the team generated the largest known collection of Facebook ads in Australian history – 328,107 unique ads – and built world-first citizen-science research infrastructure.
In The Australian Ad Observatory: A web of invisible influence you’ll hear from project leaders Prof Christine Parker, Prof Daniel Angus, Prof Mark Andrejevic and Assoc Prof Nicholas Carah, data engineer Dr Abdul Karim Obeid, PhD student Lauren Hayden, and industry partners Dr Aimee Brownbill (Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education) and Chandni Gupta (Consumer Policy Research Centre).
Prof Daniel Angus explains, “We hear a lot of debates around the role of digital media within our society, but the frustration is that these debates are not always evidenced by real findings about real-world experiences of people online.”
“Existing archives for digital advertising were made by the platforms and they had some serious limitations to them that hindered our ability to look at the ads being shown,” says Lauren Hayden.
“We had no ability to understand how ads were targeted, or who was actually seeing them.”
The first stage of research was conducted across key case studies, including political advertising, environmental claims and greenwashing, alcohol advertising, unhealthy food advertising, scam ads, and consumer finance advertising, allowing researchers to dig deep into the targeted algorithms behind automated advertising within a large platform like Facebook.
Collaborating with key industry partners such as ABC, CPRC, FARE, VicHealth and CHOICE, research findings have informed evidence-based policy submissions around illegal advertising practices, the advertising of harmful commodities, social media reforms, and more.
“Misleading and deceptive advertising by a business is unlawful,” says Prof Christine Parker.
“The problem is that when you’re advertising on social media there’s no way for a regulator to see what’s being advertised on people’s personal feeds.”
Phase 2 of the project kicked off in June 2024 and aims to address higher level research challenges around the observability of dark, ephemeral and synthetic digital media, with two significant changes to the research approach – but you’ll have to watch to find out.
“The role that we play is not in a sense just finding the evidence one time, but in engaging continuously in this conversation so that when Australians from different groups and sectors get together to talk about the power of digital platforms, we’re doing it from a much more informed point of view,” says Assoc Prof Nicholas Carah.
Watch ‘The Australian Ad Observatory: A web of invisible influence’ on YouTube.
