Give Russians real news about Ukraine using ads

This week we've passed over 300m ads shown in Russia. Thank you again for your support.

As always we have to be careful about what we give away about our techniques for doing this.

But this week I'm going to explain a little bit about why we measure our ads.

As you may know digital advertising provides us with lots of information about  how effective it is.

We are using it to understand our success in four distinct ways.

Firstly which news is most interesting to Russians?

Secondly which platforms work best? We operate in lots of different ways, and this helps us trade off the costs and benefits of each.

Thirdly we can understand the best way to deliver the news to people. Sometimes we can show people the news directly through an ad, other times we can help them find independent news.

Finally we can understand how people form news habits. If we are really successful then every Russian will be able to make up their own mind, based on all of the news. In practice we can't directly measure whether people are changing their minds. We can though try to work out if they are regularly visiting independent sources of news because of our campaign.

All the best,

Rob.