After three stylistically distinct fiction features, among which Pity [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Babis Makridis
fiche film] was arguably the most accomplished, Greek director Babis Makridis returns with an investigative documentary on digital ad fraud, Unclickable, which has just world-premiered in the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival’s International Competition.

Subtitled “An Ad Fraud Operation”, the documentary follows the former CEO of marketing technology company Upstream, Guy Krief (credited as the film’s writer), as he launches said operation in order to demonstrate how digital-advertising money ends up in scammers’ pockets with the tacit approval of Google (80% of their revenue comes from ads) and Facebook (99%), which basically have a duopoly on the market and get their cut, regardless of where the money goes or if the ads have any effect at all. So, in September 2020, ahead of the US presidential elections, Krief and a group of developers set up two websites: usculturewar.com, aimed at Republicans; and toofarleft.com, for Democrats.

When the websites are set up, so is a bot network that creates fake traffic through malware that steals information from real users. The content is also stolen by scraping existing websites and creating fake articles. Now that the sites appear to have both content and traffic, ad tech companies, such as Google’s AdSense, want to place ads on them. But on which websites these ads will end up appears to be under no one’s control. This is what some companies discovered when they saw their content on Breitbart, which they by no means wanted to be associated with. Ads get “clicked” on by bot armies as well, and the money then goes to the pockets of the creators of these fake websites. And according to some 20 experts whom the filmmakers interviewed across the world, it is not even strictly considered scamming in the legal sense, as the legislature is lagging decades behind the technology. “We know robbing is happening, but we don’t know how or by whom, exactly,” one of them says. This caused companies ranging from a small blues-merch producer in Missouri to Uber to lose significant amounts, the latter to the tune of $200 million.

Krief also goes to countries with even weaker regulation, such as South Africa and Brazil, where Android malware from the Google Play store infects users’ phones, expending data when the device is not even in use. This is far from irrelevant but feels like a detour, along with the fact that the ending is rushed, with the final stretch showing the effects of misinformation on the US elections and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which comes from the websites that generate most of the traffic. This wraps up the film and adds a strong societal component, but the footage itself leaves the impression of something we’ve already seen.

Even if it amply uses stock-like footage of genre staples, such as digital screens and burning dollar bills, and the on-screen titles look like computer code and are accompanied by keyboard typing sounds, Unclickable is stylistically a bit different from a typical Netflix-style investigative documentary. Local crews in all of these places around the world set up cameras for the interviewees, but Krief speaks to them on zoom, which editor Marios Kleftakis arranges into welcome juxtapositions. Nikitas Klint’s score is not a typically suspenseful one; instead, it’s whimsical and often jazzy, even ironically epic in some instances, recalling Makridis’s delicious, even overly tangy cynicism from Pity.

The result is a revealing film that shows there was an actual creative process in place, as opposed to streamers’ and TV’s schematic productions – even with BuzzFeed Studios on board as a co-producer, along with Athens-based Neda Film. CAT&Docs has the international rights.