Pressure mounts on Google over Adalytics report

While Google has rejected the findings of an Adalytics report claiming the tech giant has been misleading advertisers about TrueView skippable in-stream ads, it remains under pressure from leading industry figures to pay back billions of dollars.

What’s happened 

The TrueView format means that advertisers only pay “for actual views of their ads, rather than impressions”. The ads are skippable after five seconds; they must be audible; and playing of the video (and ad) cannot be solely initiated by passive user scrolling.

But Adalytics, which describes itself as “a crowd-sourced social experiment to improve how the internet does advertising”, found that “significant quantities” of TrueView ads failed to meet these standards.

“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,” it stated.

Google says

In a blog, Google responded that Adalytics “used unreliable sampling and proxy methodologies and made extremely inaccurate claims about the Google Video Partner (GVP) network … The report wrongly implies that most campaign spend runs on GVP rather than YouTube. That’s just not right.”

Why it matters

That distinction between spending on YouTube and Google partner video websites has led to some confusion. But at root, it’s yet another disagreement that comes down to the lack of transparency in the digital advertising ecosystem. The Financial Times notes that advertisers are often unaware of where their ads are running because Google limits the use of independent, third-party tracking tools that can measure how and where ads are placed. 

Key quote

“This is a systemic failure by Google and YouTube to have proper oversight and enforce their policies. Google must have a qualified third party do a full independent audit of policy enforcement, as well as this failure, and refund all impacted advertisers” – Joshua Lowcock, global chief media officer at UM.

Sourced from Financial Times, Adalytics, Google