Google has announced today a series of tweaks meant to help advertisers have more control over the places in which their ads appear.
In a post on the official blog, Chief Business Officer, Philipp Schindler, states that thousands of sites get added to Google"s ad network daily, and that "more than 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute". In light of these numbers, and cases where "brands’ ads appeared on content that was not aligned with their values", a stricter ad policy was needed.
As such, Schindler goes on to list the main points of this change in policy:
- Safer default for brands. We’re changing the default settings for ads so that they show on content that meets a higher level of brand safety and excludes potentially objectionable content that advertisers may prefer not to advertise against. Brands can opt in to advertise on broader types of content if they choose.
- Simplified management of exclusions. We’ll introduce new account-level controls to make it easier for advertisers to exclude specific sites and channels from all of their AdWords for Video and Google Display Network campaigns, and manage brand safety settings across all their campaigns with a push of a button.
- More fine-tuned controls. In addition, we’ll introduce new controls to make it easier for brands to exclude higher risk content and fine-tune where they want their ads to appear.
Along with the changes above, Google is looking into expanding "video-level reporting" on ads to all advertisers in the coming months. To improve its capacity of reviewing non advertiser-friendly content, the firm also plans on hiring "significant numbers of people" and developing new tools powered by the latest advancements in artificial intelligence.
Today"s announcement comes just days after the company reiterated its commitment to provide better "brand safety controls".
A change like this makes sense in light of the fact that Alphabet (Google"s parent company) makes the bulk of its revenue through ads.