Earlier this year, Matt Rivitz announced he planned to step aside from Sleeping Giants, an activist campaign launched five years ago to address the flow of advertising revenues to sites that promote hate speech and disinformation. The ad tech ecosystem is exceptionally complex- and the incentives in place lend themselves to waste and fraud, and to large sums of money flowing to sites that promote questionable content often without the knowledge of the people spending that money. In 2016, Rivitz and Nandini Jammi, now the cofounder of Check My Ads and a recent guest on this podcast, started building a community of concerned citizens to notify the brands often unwittingly propping up sites that feature bigoted or dangerous content. 

Scoring early wins- such as against Breitbart, which was starved of advertising by the Sleeping Giants campaign, losing thousands of programmatic advertisers- the effort ended up becoming a community of as many as a million concerned citizens with chapters all over the world, with chapters forming in France, Australia and Brazil to fight hate in their countries. Sleeping Giants played a role in a variety of campaigns, such as the DropFox campaign that urged media buyers not to buy advertisements on Fox News, and the recent Stop Hate For Profit boycott against Facebook, that saw hundreds of companies join a boycott of the social media site for its failure to address bigotry and violence on its platform.

We caught up with Matt about his decision to step aside, what he’s learned, what’s changed in the advertising ecosystem, and what’s necessary to achieve a lasting solution to the problems Sleeping Giants has addressed these last five years.