- Google reneged on an agreement to place video ads on third-party sites, raising questions about its transparency in online advertising.
- According to an investigation, he violated the agreements in 8 out of 10 videos, placing ads on pages that do not meet the agreed standards.
- Major brands, including Johnson & Johnson, American Express, and Disney, could request a refund of money invested in Google Video Partners.
Google breached an agreement to place video ads on third-party sites, according to an investigation that raises serious doubts about the transparency of the tech giant’s online advertising business.
YouTube, owned by Alphabet, runs ads on its own sites and apps. However, it also sells the placement of advertising videos on other web pages through Google Video Partners.
Google receives a premium from views. Specific, promises that the ads it places will run on high-quality websites, prior to the main video content of the page and with the placed audio enabled. In addition, brands only pay for advertising that the user has not skipped.
However, Google is violating those agreements in 8 out of 10 videos, according to an investigation by adalyticsa firm that supports brands in analyzing the sites where their online advertising is published.
What Google Video Partners does wrong
As published this Wednesday June 28 The Wall Street Journalthe company says Google places short, silent, autoplay video ads alongside the main content of pages, on websites that don’t meet agreed monetization standards.
Adalytics did the research based on looking at the ad campaigns of 1,100 brands that received billions of impressions between 2020 and 2023.
The company shared its findings with The Wall Street Journalhe.
In response, Google claims that the Adalytics research “makes numerous claims that are not accurate and do not reflect how we keep brands safe.”
In addition, it says it has “strict policies” for video ad programs on third-party websites.
According to WSJ, some of the brands that bought ads under the Google Video Partners system now want their money back. One of them is Joshua Lowcock, director of media for the advertising agency UM-Worldwide.
The US media says it independently observed the placement of invalid ads, similar to those identified by the investigation, although it cannot know the scope of the phenomenon.
Among the largest brands that use Google Video Partners and that, according to the study, They paid for locations that were not fulfilled, there are Johnson & Johnson, American Express, Samsung, Sephora, Macys, Disney and The Wall Street Journal itself.
Agencies of the United States government, such as the Medicare plan, the Army, the Social Security Administration, and the New York City government, would also have been affected.
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