Good morning, Marketer, how safe are your publishers’ algorithms?
In Tuesday’s newsletter, I discussed the brand safety issues of ads appearing on or near objectionable content as related to issues with Instagram and X/Twitter. If I’d waited a day I could’ve made it a trifecta.
A new study says ads supposed to be running on Google.com have reportedly run instead on compromising websites within the Google Search Partner network.
Dan Taylor, Google’s vice president of global ads, said in a post on X/Twitter that if this happened it was the result of one of their free products where “ads may appear based on the user’s specific search query; they are not targeted to, or based on, the website they appear on.” Taylor also faulted the study and Adalytics, the group behind it, adding that the company “did not identify ad revenue being shared with a single sanctioned entity.”
From a brand safety perspective, none of that is very reassuring. Again, if this happened then someone who saw the ad wouldn’t know why it was appearing or that no money was going to the objectionable site. The damage is done once the brand is seen in this place. All it takes is a screenshot, a social media post and an algorithmic quirk to make it go viral.
Publishers like Google and Instagram must understand how serious an issue this is and police their algorithms to prevent it. (I’m leaving out X/Twitter because Elon Musk’s remarks this week suggest he doesn’t much care).
Constantine von Hoffman,
Managing Editor
