When Google introduced a way to sell YouTube video adverts to other websites, it promised a quick way to expand the adverts’ reach.
But in doing so the search giant blatantly violated its own service obligations for TrueView ads — skippable in-stream videos — according to a new report by research firm Adalytics, which tracks how adverts appear online.
Google promised advertisers that signing up for its video partners programme meant they would “gain up to 20% additional reach for a given budget” and that these video partners would be “high-quality publisher websites and mobile apps”. Except they weren’t.
Adalytics found that ads were placed in “small, muted, automatically played videos off to the side of a page’s main content, on sites that don’t meet Google’s standards for monetisation, among other violations”, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Adalytics analysed data from advertising campaigns that ran between 2020 and 2023 for 1,100 brands. It found that advertisers — including Fortune 500 brands, the US federal government and many small businesses — “may have been misled for years about Google’s proprietary TrueView video ads”. This is supposedly a technology that allows users to skip the ad after watching the first five seconds.
Adalytics says “this misalignment may have cost media buyers up to billions of digital ad dollars, which were ultimately spent on small, muted, out-stream, auto-playing or interstitial video ad units running on independent websites and mobile apps”.
Google describes TrueView as its “proprietary cost-per-view, choice-based ad format that serves on YouTube, millions of apps, and across the web”, and that advertisers pay only “for actual views of their ads, rather than impressions”.
Advertisers may have been misled for years about Google’s proprietary TrueView skippable in-stream video ads
The Google video partners service promises that “video partner publishers are carefully vetted and must meet Google’s inventory quality standards … Advertisers can gain up to 20% additional reach for a given budget by adding Google video partners to their campaign”. It claims its internal data shows that the “average viewability of video ads using Google video partners is 90%”.
But Adalytics’s research uncovered that “significant quantities of TrueView skippable in-stream ads, purchased by many different brands and media agencies, appear to have been served on hundreds of thousands of websites and apps in which the consumer experience did not meet Google’s stated quality standards”.
The research firm said one digital advertising professional told it that “repackaging shitty, brand-unsafe out-stream as in-stream is a big problem … that seems like a fraud”.
Another ad executive, Joshua Lowcock, the global chief media officer at ad agency UM Worldwide, told The Wall Street Journal: “This is an unacceptable breach of trust by YouTube. Google must fix this and fully refund clients for any fraud and impressions that failed to meet Google’s own policies.”
The paper “independently observed invalid ad placements such as those the research identified … [while] digital ad-buyers and engineers vouched for the research findings”.
Google told the paper in its response that the report “makes many claims that are inaccurate and doesn’t reflect how we keep advertisers safe”.
So, did Google, as Adalytics — founded by physician-scientist Krzysztof Franaszek — claims, mislead advertisers?
Yes, says US advertising executive Bob Hoffman, a prominent critic of programmatic advertising, which is the underlying technology that enables this Google video offering.
“Franaszek has written several brilliant reports exposing the corruption and incompetence in the adtech and media buying industries,” Hoffman says of the researcher, who has a PhD in computational biology from Cambridge and an MD from Harvard.
“Last year he wrote a report on how billions of ads for major brands meant to run on the website of USA Today ran in the wrong places with no-one — not agencies, not [chief marketing officers], not ad verification vendors — noticing a thing.”
More worryingly, he adds that in 2022 Franaszek reported on “Google serving ads on Russia-linked websites after the sites were placed on the US sanctions list”.
Franaszek himself told The Register, a tech news publication, that Google had not disputed the findings in his company’s core research.
“The published Adalytics research report mentions the words ‘in-stream’ or ‘out-stream’ 274 times. The published Google response mentions those words zero times. The published Adalytics research report mentions the words ‘volume’, ‘muted’, ‘audible’ and ‘sound’ 116 times. Google’s published response makes zero references to sound.”
Check My Ads, another advertising watchdog organisation, said Google’s explanations contradicted its own policies. Check My Adds co-founder Nandini Jammi told The Register: “What I found striking about Google’s statement is that [it] insists that advertisers can opt out of Google video partners, when Google’s own documentation declares the exact opposite.”
Hoffman says it is “startling” that the Adalytics research was done by an advertising outsider, as opposed to an umbrella organisation such as the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) or the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s).
“The question is why it takes one person, usually working alone, like Franaszek or like the reporters who cover the ad industry, to uncover the corruption, fraud and incompetence in our industry while our ‘leaders’ in the ANA and 4A’s, who are supposed to protect advertisers from corruption, and our holding company heads who have thousands of employees and billions in resources, seem to know nothing.”
The answer is clear, he says. “The advertising industry has become a wholly owned subsidiary of adtech international. The adtech industry has subverted the integrity of the ad industry with years of fraud, corruption and incompetence. But no-one dares challenge them.”
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.