Sleeping Giants tweeted brands screenshots of their ads on Breitbart (interview)

In a September 2018 Recode Decode interview with Kara Swisher, published by Vox, Matt Rivitz, a freelance copywriter of 25 years, describes how he started the Sleeping Giants account after the 2016 election. He says he looked at Breitbart News, wondered which advertisers were paying for it, and found programmatic ads from companies such as SoFi beside its articles. Rivitz recalls screenshotting SoFi's ad and tweeting it to the company's corporate handle and its CEO, asking whether they knew it was running there; the CEO replied about half an hour later that he had no idea.

Rivitz explains, in his telling, why that worked. In programmatic advertising brands send their ads off through Google, Facebook and a few other companies, which run them wherever there is space and wherever the target audience is, unlike buying a TV slot. He says he had learned that Twitter gets answers after tweeting Ikea during a two-hour wait at its store: brands reply on a public medium, while calls and emails may go unanswered. After SoFi's ad came down, he says, a Warby Parker ad appeared, he tweeted at them too, and they quickly said they would blacklist the site.

Rivitz says he did this alone for a couple of weeks. After five or ten advertisers he asked friends with followings to share the posts, and writer Nandini Jammi joined him. The turning point, he says, was a pinned tweet with clear instructions asking followers to tag the account when they saw an ad on the site, after which he posted 'Confirmed' tweets whenever a company announced it had removed itself. He says the account kept requests polite, never called for boycotts, and that he knew it was bigger when Kellogg's pulled its ads very publicly.

Screenshot the ad where it ran and tweet it publicly to the brand and its CEO: it exposes the programmatic blind spot and makes silence costly.

Programmatic buying separated advertisers from the sites their ads ran on, so a CEO could honestly say he had no idea his company's ad was there.

A public tweet to a corporate handle and its CEO is hard for a brand to ignore, unlike a petition or an email, in Rivitz's account.

A pinned set of instructions turned followers into a distributed crew, each posting the same screenshot-and-ask to a different advertiser.

Public 'Confirmed' posts rewarded each brand that left and showed followers that each action produced a visible result.

The account stayed polite and never called for boycotts, asking brands only to decide whether they wanted their ads there.

When a hidden system keeps the people paying from seeing what they fund, one concrete example shown in public, politely and with proof attached, can move them faster than any petition.

Rivitz and Vox's introduction put the tally at more than 4,000 companies that took their ads off Breitbart (self-reported in the interview), with the account near 200,000 Twitter followers and 70,000–80,000 on Facebook. He says Breitbart barely reacted until Kellogg's left, then called a short-lived counter-boycott of Kellogg's. He describes Breitbart as a test case for a wider problem of advertisers funding outrage-driven sites, and says the account later took up other targets its community asked for.