Transcript of episode 013 -

She built a movement to take on Breitbart. Now she's finding her voice

Bridget Todd (00:00):

There Are No Girls On The Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.

Bridget Todd (00:12):

I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls On The Internet.

Bridget Todd (00:18):

"Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy." "There's no hiring bias against women in tech. They just suck at interviews." "Would you rather your child have feminism or cancer?" All of these completely messed-up headlines were actual headlines of stories published on the far-right website Breitbart.com, known for publishing misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist articles, dangerous conspiracy theories, and deliberately misleading stories. It's also one of the most important sites in the era of Trump. Their former chairman, Steve Bannon, even served as Trump's chief strategist. And where there's an online website, there's brands keeping that website afloat by giving them money to run ads on that website. But one group went on a mission to make that kind of racism, misogyny, and hate speech unprofitable.

Sleeping Giants was one of the most influential activist organizations of the Trump era.

Bridget Todd (01:09):

Sleeping Giants became one of the most influential activist organizations of the Trump era. Their strategy involved urging their members to tweet screenshots of brands running ads on websites that support and publish hate speech, asking if those sites matched their values, and urging them to pull their ads. In doing so, they learned that oftentimes, reputable brands have no idea what sites their ads run on.

Bridget Todd (01:33):

Sleeping Giants was run anonymously to create the impression that it was run by more than just two people. After the conservative news outlet Daily Caller published a piece outing one person behind Sleeping Giants, Matt Rivitz, he and his family faced death threats. Later, Matt was profiled in a New York Times piece alongside Sleeping Giants co-founder Nandini Jammi. Sleeping Giants was so successful that they contributed to Breitbart seeing a 90 percent drop in ad revenue. They also contributed to a broader conversation about how reputable brands are funding extremism by spending ad money on websites that publish hate speech. So this should be a success story, right?

Why taking credit matters

Bridget Todd (02:14):

In July, Nandini published a scathing piece on Medium, saying that while she believed she was working with Matt as a partner, he gaslighted her out of the movement they built together. While their working relationship started on a good note, Matt began taking high-profile speaking engagements and obscuring her role in their work, eventually erasing her altogether. She writes: "I want to share with you my journey with Sleeping Giants, why taking credit matters, and why you must fight for yourself as hard as you fight for your cause. I want to show you how a woman of color almost disappeared from the movement she built, and what you can achieve when you refuse to follow the rules your white male leader sets for you. I hope other brilliant women of color and marginalized folks see yourselves in me and don't wait as long as I did. The stakes are too high for you to disappear." Now, Nandini is done letting her voice be left out of the narrative.

Bridget Todd (03:10):

So, how did you get started in this work?

Nandini Jammi (03:12):

In November 2016, I was working as head of growth for a tech startup, and I went to visit Breitbart.com for the first time after the elections. Just like everyone else, I was trying to figure out what happened and what we're dealing with here. And the first thing I noticed was ads for some of the biggest companies in the world on this website. We've been hearing a lot about how it was putting out hate speech and misinformation and fake stories and all that stuff, but no one had ever really talked about the ads, and the ads are how that website makes money.

Nandini Jammi (03:57):

I'm no genius. I just had one Google Ad campaign once, a couple of months before that, and I had been quite particular about where my ads were going. I was curious and interested in making sure they were appearing in sort of reputable places on the Internet. And so the first thing I thought of was the site placements. The marketers who are running their campaigns are not looking at their site placements, and all we have to do is get these folks to add Breitbart.com to their exclusion list. If they do that, then Breitbart will no longer make money.

Nandini Jammi (04:42):

It was kind of a crazy idea, because there are so many companies who have Google Ads, possibly millions, and the idea was to get all of them, one by one, to drop Breitbart. So I wrote a Medium post and hoped for it to go viral, where I basically sort of outlined this crackpot idea where I was like, "We should all just go into our Google Ads, add it to our exclusion list, and then Breitbart won't receive our money anymore, and then they'll go out of business."

Nandini Jammi (05:20):

And while that piece didn't go viral, the concept of tweeting at a company, which is something that I did as well. I tweeted out at Old Navy, that was the first ad I saw, and letting them know that their ad is funding this hateful website was something that took off. Someone else on the other side of the country, who became my partner, had the same idea. We sort of went into business in that sense, in terms of reaching out to companies and asking them to check their ads and make sure that they have Breitbart on their exclusion list. And it just kind of took off from there.

Bridget Todd (06:08):

So from you writing this piece, urging these brands to block ad spends on Breitbart, this is how you first got connected with Matt. Matt reached out to you from this piece and thought, "We should work together." How did your relationship with Matt and Sleeping Giants come to be?

Nandini Jammi (06:24):

So I wrote this piece on, I believe it was November 23rd, and then by the next day, he had tweeted at me, saying, "Awesome article. We're doing the same thing. You should join us." And I was super excited to see that someone else had the same idea. We moved very quickly from DMs to e-mail to phone. Turns out we just have a lot in common. We're both copywriters. We're both originally from Maryland, and he seemed really cool, so of course I wanted to work together. I think for me, joining forces meant that we were partners. He had just started Sleeping Giants as an account a week before, and it was still nothing. There was maybe a couple dozen, maybe a couple hundred followers.

Nandini Jammi (07:22):

What we decided to do was, I would run the Facebook page, so we started up a Facebook page, which I became responsible for, and he continued to run the Twitter account. And there was no formal agreement or anything like that, because we never imagined that it would turn into anything, so we were just like, "All right." It was just taking it one day at a time, flying by the seat of our pants kind of a deal.

By harnessing the power of collective social media users to pressure brands out of funding hate, they were having a real impact.

Bridget Todd (07:51):

Nandini and Matt hit on something big. By harnessing the power of collective social media users to pressure brands out of funding hate, they were having a real impact. They got thousands of brands, like AT&T, BMW, Visa, Lyft, and Warby Parker to stop running ads on Breitbart. Steve Bannon was even recorded talking about Sleeping Giants at a dinner in 2018.

Steve Bannon (08:14):

When I left to take over the campaign, we were going to make, like, $8 million of free cash flow that year. After we won, this group called Sleeping Giants, a group of tech executives, they literally stripped down... They went to 35 exchanges that sell the ads. 31 went away. So the ad revenues dropped, like, 90 percent.

after Kellogg's pulled their ads, Breitbart tried to organize an embarrassingly unsuccessful counter-boycott

Bridget Todd (08:36):

They even got Breitbart so mad that after Kellogg's pulled their ads, Breitbart tried to organize an embarrassingly unsuccessful counter-boycott, which Kellogg's said had no discernible impact on their sales. After it was revealed that Fox News's Bill O'Reilly settled five different sexual harassment suits, Sleeping Giants pressured brands to stop advertising on his show. In a week's time, The O'Reilly Factor lost more than half of its advertisers, and Bill O'Reilly went on "vacation" and never returned.

Bridget Todd (09:07):

What were some of the successes that you all had with Sleeping Giants that you were really proud of?

Nandini Jammi (09:11):

Oh, my God. We did so much. There was just a daily grind of getting ads to drop. The first few months of this campaign was, every day, a couple dozen brands or whatever would drop. Sometimes it would be really big ones, so our first big win was Kellogg's. That resulted in Breitbart starting a campaign called, I think it was Dump Kellogg's or something, and it completely backfired. They were like, "Kellogg's doesn't support Breitbart readers, so we're going to dump Kellogg's in the sink," or something like that. It was so stupid, but it gave us our first international headline, so that was really cool. But yeah, the first couple of months was just like, every so often, some big brand would come out and be like, "Yeah, we don't support this shit." And then after a while, we felt like we could start working on other things.

Nandini Jammi (10:28):

The first time we sort of grew out of the Breitbart work was when we decided to target Bill O'Reilly's advertisers. Bill O'Reilly had been sexually harassing his colleagues in the workplace for a period of decades, and The New York Times reported on it. We were like, "Well, this fits into our mission statement of making bigotry and sexism unprofitable," and we felt like this is something we could take on. So we decided to contact Bill O'Reilly advertisers using the same exact M.O. that we did with Breitbart, just presenting them with the information and letting them make their own decision. And Bill O'Reilly lost dozens of advertisers, and a couple months later, he was on spring break or an unplanned vacation or whatever [crosstalk 00:11:25] vacation.

Bridget Todd (11:28):

Heavy scare quotes around that.

Nandini Jammi (11:30):

I know, right? Yeah, and then he was gone, and we were like, "Wow, we are really on to something." And then we went on to target Tucker Carlson's advertisers. He's lost over, I believe, 80 advertisers over the past two years that we've been working on that. His show is basically unprofitable. It's one of the highest-rated shows on television. It just doesn't bring in any money.

Bridget Todd (11:58):

Just as a side note, one of my day jobs involves working with a feminist activist group, and we've targeted Tucker Carlson over the years, and I don't know what the deal is, but that guy just keeps hanging on. We can't seem to get him out of here.

Nandini Jammi (12:12):

I think it's a lot of personal spite, to be honest, because after we got... There was one advertiser who... They're a language learning app called Babbel, and they put out quite the blistering statement on their Tucker Carlson ads. They were sort of caught unawares, and they responded to our tweet, saying, "We're so sorry. We're disappointed that our ads showed up on Tucker Carlson. We find his rhetoric to be repugnant," and that just triggered them. They released, I think, their first statement, specifically calling us out. It was us, Media Matters, and MoveOn.org, and it was actually... I was very proud of that. I mean, we're just two people running an account in our spare time. So I felt pretty proud of ourselves then.

brands have a responsibility to be choosy about where their money goes

Bridget Todd (13:14):

You should definitely feel so proud of the work that you accomplished with Sleeping Giants. No one can take that away from you. Those are huge wins, and also huge, culture-changing moments, this idea that, "Yeah, brands do have a responsibility to be a little bit choosy about where their money goes. We should be pressuring brands to open their eyes to where they spend their money." That's a huge cultural shift that I don't think existed before your work, so you should definitely feel very, very proud and accomplished about that.

Nandini Jammi (13:47):

Thank you.

Bridget Todd (13:48):

So when did things start to feel not so good, working with Matt on Sleeping Giants?

Nandini Jammi (13:52):

Yeah, so we had a really good relationship from the beginning. He was very nice to me, and also, I admired him a lot, and I never imagined that there would ever be problems, because it was like, we're both here every day, putting in the work, and I think there was a lot of mutual respect. At least that's what it felt like.

Nandini Jammi (14:22):

When Matt realized that he was about to be doxxed by The Daily Caller, he went to The New York Times to sort of get ahead of the story, and during that time, asked me whether I would like to be interviewed for the story. And when he said that, I think I assumed that I was being asked as a partner. I spoke to the reporter. I told her how I was involved in all the stuff that we were doing, and a little bit of background detail on how we worked. And she asked me what my title was, and I said, "Co-founder." And then she was like, "Great," and then she comes back the next day and does a little fact-checking. And then she said, "By the way, your partner said that you are not a co-founder." And I was like, "Oh, okay." And I didn't want to make a big deal out of it, so I didn't. I was like, "Just go with whatever he says." But that was sort of the first indicator that something was off.

I don't want to be portrayed as your helper or your assistant. It's important that I'm also portrayed as a leader

Nandini Jammi (15:25):

And then after that, the story came out, and my partner went on to take interviews with sort of high-profile outlets like Pod Save America, with Kara Swisher, spoke with Katie Couric. And it was after his interview with Adweek that I became concerned about everything, because he was positioning himself as co-founder, which was fine by me, but in that article, I was positioned or portrayed as one of the individuals helping him run the accounts. So at that point, I called a meeting, and I said, "Hey, listen. I don't want to be portrayed as your helper or your assistant. It's important that I'm also portrayed as a leader, because I have been involved in this work for the whole time, and I realize that I'm in a really unique position, like both of us. We're both in a very unique position to be able to influence the advertising industry. And I want to be able to speak at conferences and events, and I want to be present at the table when some of these big decisions are made. And that's why it's important to me to have a title."

Nandini Jammi (16:49):

So we had that discussion, and he said, "I completely understand. Let's get you a title. You can call yourself whatever you want. Obviously not founder. I'm the founder. So you can call yourself... You know, come up with a name." So I said, "How about founding organizer?" And he agreed to that, so that's what I called myself for about a year. During that time, he continued to position himself as founder, of course, and was able to leverage that to get invited to big conferences. For example, South by Southwest and Advertising Week and so on. And I just kind of felt like I was flailing. I didn't really have an opportunity to speak at anything like that, because I, A, didn't have a title, and B, I didn't have any contacts in the industry. I truly was sort of cast out on my own. Again, advertising isn't really my world. I don't have connections in that industry. I worked in the tech startup scene. That's a totally different world. So it was frustrating.

Nandini Jammi (18:09):

I couldn't get to where I wanted to be, so what I did was, I basically asked him for the scraps. I was like, "Would you mind telling me about some of these conferences that you're going to? I would love to come along. I would like to be your plus one. We can work the room together. We can meet more people together." I was always really careful about, "I don't want to steal your thunder. I don't want the attention. I just want to be working in the background to, I don't know, to make something happen." And there was a power differential there, because this is his industry, and he's older than me, and he knows more people than me, and he would bring that up quite frequently in the calls that we had, where I was sort of outlining my issues. He would always say, "Yeah, sure, I'll let you know. I'll give you a shout if these things happen." But he never did.

Nandini Jammi (19:15):

There was a couple of other things that concerned me. I didn't have any access to the general inquiries e-mail. I just didn't know what was coming into the organization. Was he receiving media opportunities there or opportunities to speak? Private consulting opportunities? These were the kinds of things that weren't coming to me, necessarily. He had asked me to send all press requests to him, because that would help us stay on-message, so you don't want too many people speaking to the press. I thought that was a little weird, because I was running the Facebook account completely independently. It's not like I was getting permission from him before I wrote posts or anything like that. So it's not like I would muddle the message, because I know what the message is. I write the message every day. I'm not involved in anything related to the merch shop. I don't know how much money is being made. I don't know how it's being spent. When I asked for access to that, he said, "You're just going to have to trust me." And I didn't know what to do with that.

Bridget Todd (20:34):

We'll be right back.

Bridget Todd (20:43):

Let's get right back into it. As Matt's public profile grew, Nandini's role in Sleeping Giants was obscured. As she writes in her Medium piece, "On Twitter, Matt began to replace what was once a collective 'we' with 'I' and 'my.' The work I had done with Sleeping Giants was also appearing on his conference bio. The vagueness that once helped us look like a mysterious group bigger than we were was now being claimed solely by him. I didn't have the media attention or connections that Matt did. I wasn't 45, white, and I certainly didn't know anybody in advertising. I was young, unknown, and invisible."

Bridget Todd (21:22):

It's difficult for me to hear about Nandini's experience with Sleeping Giants. I certainly know what it's like to be passed over for being credited or compensated for my work, and if you're a woman, especially a woman of color, you probably know what that feels like, too. I've avoided speaking out because I didn't want to seem like a braggart or someone who couldn't share the spotlight, or worse, someone who was only interested in accolades. And in our deeply sexist culture, is there anything more shameful than being a woman who wants success? And it's especially tricky when you're working for social change, the implication being that we should all be doing the work just because we care about making change, not because we want credit. But this line of thinking can actually be kind of a trap that keeps us from taking what's ours while our wins are claimed by somebody else. You're not an attention-seeker for wanting to be acknowledged for your work.

When women advocate for themselves to get the title, to get the credit, it's not because we're fame-hungry spotlight hogs. It's because if we don't have those things, we're not able to have the impact we want to have.

Bridget Todd (22:13):

One thing that I hear time and time again is why it's important to get credit. I feel like people really need to understand that it's not about fame and fortune and the limelight. Unfortunately, the way that it works in many tech industries is, if you don't have a title or if you're not able to point to something and say, "Yeah, I did that," you're not going to get invited to the conference. You're not going to get invited to speak. You're not going to get the consulting opportunity. You're not going to be able to build up your platform to be able to have a bigger footprint to do the kind of work and make the kind of change that you want to make. And so when women, particularly women of color, advocate for themselves to get the title, to get the credit, it's not because we're fame-hungry, attention-hungry spotlight hogs. It's because if we don't have those things, we're not going to be able to have the kind of impact that we want to be able to have. I know that I have often felt a little skittish about asking for a title, because I don't want to look like I'm trying to be a fame hog or something. When in reality, it's just the nature of how a lot of these businesses work.

Nandini Jammi (23:31):

You said it. That's exactly right. I was so afraid of being perceived as someone who just wanted attention that I tried to sidestep that issue by denying myself credit and by sort of actively staying away from the titles that would have given me the power I needed. As a co-founder, when I finally made that shift from a nonsense title... "Founding organizer" doesn't mean anything. It's like assistant to the regional manager. When I made that shift, I found that people responded to me differently. I found that I took myself more seriously. It was really eye-opening to me to see how important titles are for people who are not traditionally viewed as leaders in this society. I almost underestimated myself. I guess I didn't realize how the world sees me. That was something that I kind of learned the hard way. Despite the fact that I was good at what I do, that I had demonstrated my abilities, people looked at me and didn't see me as a leader. I'm sure a lot of people still don't. So really claiming that title is one of the most important things that you can do, and I don't want anyone to think that doing that is some kind of making a beeline for the fame and fortune or the glory of it all.

Bridget Todd (25:17):

Nandini decided that she was going to stop playing by the rules Matt set for her, the rules that allowed him to grow his public profile while she went forgotten and overlooked. The rules that allowed Matt to fly to France to accept the prestigious Cannes Lion Award, essentially the Oscars of the creative industry, on behalf of the organization they created together, without even telling her.

Bridget Todd (25:39):

So when did you decide, "I am going to claim this title for myself, I'm going to walk in this title and walk in this purpose, and I don't care what Matt thinks"?

Nandini Jammi (25:51):

It was after he DM'd me a picture of himself accepting a Cannes Gold Lion in June 2019. And it was super casual, like, "Hey, we just won a Cannes Gold Lion," and he hadn't told me he was going to be in France. I found out through Instagram that he was in Cannes. I had to DM him and be like, "Oh, cool, you're in Europe." And yeah, it was really shocking.

Nandini Jammi (26:29):

That was a very [inaudible 00:26:31] week for me, because first of all, as I said, I'm not from the industry, so I knew the Cannes Gold Lion was a big deal, but I didn't realize that it was, like, the Oscars of the ad industry. And I was receiving messages from all sorts of people that never talked to me. They were like, "Wow, congratulations!" And it was like additional emotional labor for me. I had to basically lie on his behalf. People asked me why I wasn't there, and if I said the truth, I wasn't invited, I wasn't told, that would sort of blow our cover, right? And I didn't want to create problems for Sleeping Giants, so I was like, "Yeah, I just couldn't make it."

I was giving up my power

Nandini Jammi (27:24):

So I realized at that point that I was not actually ever going to be made a part of this campaign. I was being actively erased from the story. I was not mentioned anywhere at one of our sort of highest points of our campaign. And I realized that all the things that I had been doing over the past year were only serving him and allowing him to sort of accumulate power, and I was giving up my power. I was giving up my power when I sent over press requests to him, which allowed him to build out his resume and say, "I have been quoted in all these news outlets." I was giving up my ability to do the same. I was giving up my power when I allowed myself to be called founding organizer and being consistently seen as a number two and someone who doesn't necessarily know what's going on or can speak for the organization.

So I made an executive decision over my own life. I promoted myself

Nandini Jammi (28:44):

So I made an executive decision over my own life. I promoted myself to co-founder, and the first opportunity I had to do that was about two months later. It was exactly this time last year, when I was preparing for a presentation for a talk in Scotland, and just a few days before, I was looking for a fresh example of tech platforms being irresponsible. And I went to the Ku Klux Klan's website and found a PayPal widget on their site. And my brain's so broken that I don't know what a big deal is anymore. I just tweeted it out, like I tweet a million other things, and I moved on. And a couple days later, just right after I gave that big talk where someone had changed my title, bless them, from founding organizer to co-founder without my knowledge. But again, bless them.

Nandini Jammi (29:53):

So a couple days after that, PayPal banned the KKK from their services, and the BBC called me, asking for a quote. And I told them that I was co-founder of Sleeping Giants. The day after that, I got a profile out in an ad industry magazine called The Drum. It turns out that the reporter that I spoke to, the first reporter I spoke to after the conference, was doing a profile on me. And so all of a sudden, I had this profile calling me the co-founder of Sleeping Giants. It was a full piece on what I think of the ad industry and how things are going.

Bridget Todd (30:40):

Wow. What did that feel like for you?

Nandini Jammi (30:43):

It felt like I had just come into my power. I had just stepped into my power. I was with my friend Claire, who is now my business partner, and we just looked at each other. She knew that I had been going through a lot, and we just looked at each other, and we were like, "Wow. Everything is turning around. Look how quickly things turn around when you claim what's yours."

today is the day that I abandon that, and I walk in my power

Bridget Todd (31:13):

Mm! Fuck yeah. I'm on the verge of tears, listening to this. I think your story is my story. Your story is the story of so many women of color out there. I think that we are often told that there is virtue in "Just keep your head down and do your work and be behind the scenes." There's a virtue in making yourself small and not claiming that power. And then when you ride in that lane of making yourself small, of not walking in your power, and then you finally say, "I'm done with this, today is the day that I abandon that and I walk in my power," the feeling is like nothing else, and it comes from inside, right? And I think that we are sold this lie that the path of "Just keep grinding, keep your head down, and you'll get your reward, you'll get your credit someday, maybe..." It just really doesn't serve us.

Nandini Jammi (32:11):

No, it doesn't. I can't imagine what I could have accomplished even sooner if I had chosen to step into that power before. What I did instead... Because after that Cannes incident, I was going to leave. I had deeply considered leaving Sleeping Giants because I wasn't getting the respect I was asking for, because all I was going to get was the crumbs in the relationship and the way that it stood at that point in time. What I did instead was, I decided to stay, and I decided that I would change the rules. I wasn't going to play by the rules that were made for me.

Nandini Jammi (33:08):

I guess the moment that I stopped playing by the rules and when I started to speak to the press, to start writing under my own name, which is something that I hadn't been doing, people started to see... First of all, people just started to see me. I just became more visible. And that put me in a position where people wanted to reach out to me because they wanted to talk to me about my thoughts. And that allowed me to start connecting with people in the industry. And that's what helped me to meet the people who would become my allies, the people who would make introductions for me in the industry, the people who would become my future business partners. And it was a slow-moving situation. None of it happened overnight. But really, that investment in building relationships and building my knowledge was what helped me get to the point where I could just come out and say, "I am co-founder, and this is who I am."

Bridget Todd (34:21):

You talked earlier about your allies. You have this great line in your Medium piece that I love. You say, "It costs nothing to make space for me. It costs nothing to CC me in. It costs nothing to empower other people to achieve their goals." And I think you just really hit the nail on the head. All of the people in my life who have been my allies and my co-conspirators, they are the ones who are down to send the e-mail, down to write a reference, down to connect me with an opportunity, because it doesn't cost them anything. And I really think we need to reject this mindset that tells us that we have to be stingy when it comes to resources or putting somebody else on. Because what's better is if we lift others up as we climb. And all of our work is better when we empower each other. There's truly enough room for all of us.

Nandini Jammi (35:06):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there were so many times where... I mean, I learned so much in the past year, and many times, I offered to get on calls with my partner and brief him on what I had learned, and I wanted to make it work, to the point that I was willing to continue working with someone who was fairly toxic towards me in the way that he spoke to me at times. But I wanted to make it work because the movement that we have here, the movement that we have built, is more important than either one of our egos.

Bridget Todd (35:48):

Do you ever feel that... I don't really even know how to put this. In work that involves tech and the Internet, we have this myth that there's this one genius, usually a white dude, but it's usually this one genius who does everything. We love the idea that there's one lone wolf who is doing this really cool work. And that really denies what we know is the truth, that so much of this work is collaborative. So much of it is people working together. Do you think that's a problem in the tech space and in the ad space in general?

Nandini Jammi (36:25):

Oh, yeah. I mean, I could see the press was dying to find their lone-wolf hero for this Sleeping Giants story. I just don't think they knew what to do with a woman in the story. Which made no sense to me, because in the New York Times article, in our big coming-out article, we were equally weighted visually. The pictures were the same size. Why did no one ask about me? "Where did the girl go? Where is she at? What does she think about the issues?" I mean, it is a campaign against bigotry and sexism. Where is the brown girl? So yeah, I think the industry as well as the media is looking for their white man savior, which is a problem.

Nandini Jammi (37:24):

But I believe that I... I mean, I've taken those lessons to heart, and I see how these stories are built now, and I am dead set on never letting that happen again, at least in my life and in my work and the people whose lives that I touch. With the company that Claire and I ended up starting after a year of working together, researching things together, interviewing people together, we launched this company as co-founders, as equal partners. There was never any question about it, and I have name-dropped her in... Well, I guess in our relationship now, as we started this company, I'm sort of the more well-known person, and that sort of puts me in a place of privilege in our relationship, and so I use that to name-drop her in everything that I do. And when an opportunity comes to me that I think she's better suited for, I send it over to her. And she does the same for me.

Bridget Todd (38:42):

Let's take a quick break.

Bridget Todd (38:53):

And we're back. Alongside her partner, Claire Atkin, Nandini now runs Check My Ads, an organization that helps brands keep their ad money away from fake news, disinformation, and hate speech. And as much behind-the-scenes success as she had getting brands to pull their ad dollars away from inflammatory sites, with Sleeping Giants, their work created another kind of problem. Brands concerned about ending up in Sleeping Giants's crosshairs and wary of being associated with anything negative started using keyword-blocking software to make sure their ads weren't running on controversial topics. Now Wired reports that these ad blockers actually end up blocking terms in kind of haphazard ways. The magazine publisher Hearst complained that articles about Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, spelled S-U-S-S-E-X, were being blocked because the word "sex" appeared on blocklists.

Bridget Todd (39:47):

What's worse, terms like "lesbian" and "bisexual" were blocked for being controversial. Some blocklists also blocked ad placements on news articles from reputable sites about coronavirus information. And some brands were blocking their ads from news sites in general, creating less ad money for an already-struggling news industry. Her new company, Check My Ads, aims to tackle the issues her work with Sleeping Giants might have inadvertently contributed to.

Bridget Todd (40:14):

So I want to talk about Check My Ads. I was just reading the Wired piece about Check My Ads. So in a kind of way, and forgive me if I bungle this, and feel free to correct me. I'm no ad tech person, but I thought I got a handle on it. So in a kind of way, Sleeping Giants, as many successes as y'all had, in a kind of way, it kind of made the media landscape a bit worse because some brands were then, like, "Oh, well, if I'm going to get dinged for having my ad next to a hate site, I'm just going to have my ads pulled from anything that could be possibly read as controversial, even things like COVID." And so it really kind of created a problem for how ad dollars were spent in the media landscape more generally. Is that sort of correct?

Nandini Jammi (41:05):

That's 100 percent correct. What I never anticipated, working on this campaign... When we started tweeting at companies, we were very clear that we think that they should look at their ad placement on Breitbart because it is... We used very specific descriptors like homophobic, xenophobic, racist, white nationalist. What we did not realize or anticipate was that the way that that work would be interpreted in the boardroom would be, "Oh, these guys are just going after content they don't agree with and content that is so-called controversial," because the boardrooms are filled with mostly white people. The ad industry is mostly white guys, and the tech industry are mostly white people. So they don't feel comfortable having conversations about racism or even using that word. So they literally just swapped out "racist" with the word "controversial" or "offensive," or even "yikes." "Yikes moments."

Bridget Todd (42:18):

Not "Yikes."

Nandini Jammi (42:18):

Not "Yikes." It's called hate speech.

Bridget Todd (42:24):

Oh, that really... Oof. I love the euphemisms for not having to use the word "racist." So "Yikes moment."

Nandini Jammi (42:34):

Yep. So Check My Ads, we started it as a brand safety consultancy to, A, help companies check their ads to understand where their ads are going, to help them identify hate speech and disinformation in their media buy. And we also, on the other hand, help them to become more intentional about what they want to support, because that's sort of what brands are looking at these days. There's so many reasons that our existing channels are toxic or brand-unsafe or causing trouble in society that brands and marketers are really starting to explore ways to be smarter and spend their money in a way that's more aligned with their values.

Nandini Jammi (43:32):

So we're helping brands to define their own rules and define where the line is when it comes to their media buy. So that really helps them to start thinking about what they want to support in a way that doesn't feel political. We want them to be able to have that conversation through a shared language where they're able to sit down and say, "We shouldn't be advertising on a website like this, because it's not aligned with this value or this campaign that we have in place," and to do so in a way that doesn't make people feel uncomfortable. So we want to be able to facilitate those conversations within a company so they can make those decisions ahead of time, instead of having to respond to them when it turns into a massive issue on social media.

Bridget Todd (44:29):

Nandini is fully a leader in her industry. Her innovative work helps shift culture and build paths for accountability online that anyone with a Twitter account can participate in. And now, she's building on what she's learned to refine the way she makes change. None of this would be possible if she had just kept her head down, made herself small, and followed somebody else's plan for her life. After she published her Medium piece, in a Tweet, Matt apologized and acknowledged Nandini as a rightful co-founder of Sleeping Giants. And now, she wants to make sure that other women know there's nothing wrong with wanting credit for your work.

Bridget Todd (45:07):

What would you say to a woman out there that's listening that is keeping her head down, she's doing the grind, she's afraid to step into her power, as you put it? She wants credit, she wants that title, but she doesn't know where to start, and she's afraid to even start that journey. What would you say to someone like that?

Nandini Jammi (45:29):

I would say that she can start building her own power today by writing. I was able to start building my power when I had nothing and nobody, simply by writing a little bit on LinkedIn every day, just a little bit, about current events, about how I feel about something that happened, my opinion, my perspective. No one asked, and for a long time, no one cared. But when you do it every day, you demonstrate your knowledge and your insight. You represent what you're capable of. You show people how you think and how you approach problems. And people do start to pay attention. You do start to build out the people who care, the people who want to engage with you. And from there, you can start building out the relationships that you need to either find your next place, a less toxic place, a place where you can be more powerful, and at the very least, to build your personal influence.

Bridget Todd (46:41):

That was something that really helped me, was just positioning myself as a thought leader, even if it was to no one but me. Right?

Nandini Jammi (46:48):

Exactly. You get used to saying "I." That was something that I never did, because I thought, "Who cares what I think? I don't even care what I think." That was the attitude I had about myself. So just the simple act of saying "I," "This is what I think," was quite radical for me, because what you think matters. So what you write matters, too.

Bridget Todd (47:18):

Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello@tangoti.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoti.com. There Are No Girls On The Internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd.

Bridget Todd (47:41):

If you want to help us grow, write and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.