le accused of misselling ads on third party websites for years

Google is accused of misselling video ads for three years to marketers.

According to a study by Adalytics, Google violates its own standards 80% of the times.

As a result, dozens of marketers have expressed regret at purchasing Google’s True View product.

Why do we care? Advertisers are paying premium prices to Google for a service they claim to have failed to deliver. This could cost them billions in digital advertising dollars. The reactions of advertisers who were impacted by Google’s substandard service may cause other marketers to think twice about placing ads through the Google Video Partners Program.

True View works True View, Google’s main video advertising product, is available on YouTube and third-party apps. True View ads can be skipped after 5 seconds. However, marketers are only charged when the video is watched for at least 30 second (or 30 seconds if the ad is less than 30). Marketers will only be charged for their ads if they also play audio and are not accidentally activated by users scrolling down a page.

Google charges high rates when these ads are checked. The deal is negotiated through a program known as Google Video Partners.

Advertisers are rewarded for paying these high fees by:

• High-quality websites will have ads.
• Before the main video content of a page begins, ads will be played.
• Only when the audio is on, will ads play.
• Advertisements are only played after the viewer initiates.
• The only ads they will have to pay for are those that aren’t missed.

Has Google broken its promises to advertisers? According to Adalytics, Google is accused of breaking its own standards most of the time and still charging marketers premium fees.

Google has been accused of misleading its advertisers by:

• Premium ads are not played with the audio promised.
• Place ads in small videos on low-value locations, such as to the side of a main page’s content.
• Place ads in videos that automatically play.
• Placement of ads on websites which do not meet Google’s standards.

A dozen advertisers said they would not have bought ad spaces through the Google Video Partners Program if they had been informed of these issues beforehand. Advertisers said that they were also shocked, and did not want their ads playing without audio. They felt this contradicted the ad spaces they purchased.

What Google says. Marvin Renaud is the Director of Global Video Solutions at Google. Ads & Commerce blog issued a denial on the Google Ads & Commerce blog soon after the Adalytics Report was published. He said:

• We care as much about the placement of our ads as do brands. Recent reports by third parties used unreliable sample and proxy methods and made inaccurate claims about Google Video Partner’s (GVP) Network.”
• “The report wrongly implies that most campaign spend runs on GVP rather than YouTube. That’s just not right. The overwhelming majority of video ad campaigns serve on YouTube.”
• “Video advertisers can also run ads on GVP, a separate network of third-party sites, to reach additional audiences, if it helps them meet their business objectives. While only a small percentage of video ads appear on GVP, it’s effective: we’ve seen adding GVP to YouTube campaigns increases reach by over 20% for the same budget.”
• “Ad inventory across the Google Video Partner network is more than 90% viewable. This is well above industry norms. The claims in the third-party report simply aren’t right. Put simply, over 90% of ads on GVP are visible to people across the web — and advertisers are only paying for ads when they are viewed.”
• “In addition to the high bar we set on YouTube, we have strict policies that all third-party publishers, including Google Video Partners, must follow. We actively enforce these policies. Our policies prohibit made for advertising (MFA) content. To give you a sense of how serious we are about this, in 2022 we stopped serving ads on more than 143,000 sites for violating our policies.”
• “We offer third-party validation for ads running on Google Video Partners content. We partner with outside organizations to help us ensure publishers are complying with our policies. Google Video Partners supports independent, third party verification from DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, and Moat for viewability and invalid traffic. These partnerships, combined with the work we already do internally to enforce our policies, give advertisers reassurance about their ad placements.”

Who is Adalytics? Adalytics is a crowd-sourced advertising performance optimization platform that was set up to review and improve the digital advertising landscape. The company conducted this research by investigating campaigns for more than 1,100 brands that achieved billions of ad impressions between 2020 and 2023.

Deep dive. You can learn more about Adalytics’ investigation by reading its report, Did Google mislead advertisers about TrueView skippable in-stream ads for the past three years? You can also read Google’s ‘Transparency and brand safety on Google Video Partners‘ statement which was made in response to the report.

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