When Issy Coghill interacted with an ad for a vape purporting to help with anxiety, the 21-year-old’s social media feed changed dramatically. All of a sudden, their ads „started getting more curated for alternative smokes“. Issy found a brand that appeared to have a legitimate online store — and claimed to have relationships with trusted mental health organisations. „I bought [one], received it, and six months later the store I bought it from shut down overnight.“ Issy’s product didn’t cause any serious health issues — but other people haven’t been so lucky. In June, five people were hospitalised with seizures and vomiting after consuming „mushroom gummies“, which had been advertised on social media as an anxiety treatment. The incident led to a national recall and prompted warnings from health authorities across Australia.
Dark marketing refers to ad campaigns that can be hard to observe and even harder to track back to legitimate businesses, according to University of Queensland associate professor Nicholas Carah. A recent multi-university study in partnership with Victoria Health found young Australians are being „bombarded“ by „manipulative“ and „creepy“ dark marketing campaigns online. „Once upon a time, everyone would see the ads on television or on billboards, but now they’re only seen by particular people,“ Dr Carah said. „So as a public we don’t have a sense of what ads might be floating around out there.“ He said advertisers „scoop up data“ about users to feed into algorithms that target ads to particular people at particular moments. The Therapeutic Goods Association (TGA) said it increased its focus on online advertising of therapeutic goods after the COVID pandemic began. In the 2021-22 financial year 1,147 non-compliant ads were removed, it said, and the following year, 16,328 ads were removed across 10 platforms. The top three products advertised were pain medication, alternative medicines and weight-loss products.
Dr Carah said it could be hard to tell whether dark marketing was getting more or less prolific because the source of the ads were often hard to track. Platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok employ „brand safety controls“ that ensure advertising on the site is of a certain quality. But Dr Carah said those controls aren’t fully effective. „We see examples of a dangerous product that’s been advertised or sold to a platform, or generative AI tools that create fake news — which is basically illegal — but that advertising is still getting through and appearing on those platforms,“ he said. „The platforms really don’t help us understand the scale of the problems, because they don’t provide ways of really being able to properly observe what’s going on.“ With „hundreds of thousands“ of ads visible daily across online platforms, Dr Carah said it was not feasible to rely on individuals to report problematic ads. Advertisers are also getting better at mimicking trusted brands. „It’s a much more difficult environment for consumers to figure out what’s going on, and so traditional calls for consumers [to have] better literacy are only part of the solution,“ Dr Carah said. He believes the platforms themselves need to be held more accountable for advertising. Traditional broadcasters can suffer reputational damage and risk having their license conditions revoked if they break advertising rules, but online platforms aren’t subject to similar rules, Dr Carah said. „There’s no technical reason why we can’t set rules. It’s just a social and political decision that we have to make.“ A Meta spokesperson said it prohibited content in both ads and organic content that „promotes the buying and selling of pharmaceutical and non-medical drugs, and remove it whenever we find it“. „We continue to invest resources and further improve our enforcement on this kind of content,“ they said.