Transparen-see, that’s not so hard, Google

We got a BIG win for transparency this week: Google announced it rolled out YouTube video placement reporting for Performance Max (PMax) campaigns. 

First, an explanation. Think of PMax as Google’s magic black box. It takes an ad budget and then puts ads wherever "they perform the best" --allegedly. And, it only gives advertisers placement reporting for some of the places that ads appear.  We know how adtech’s “just trust us products” typically work out, and this is no different.

In this case, an Adalytics report showed that instead of properly targeting adults, Pmax was funneling advertisers’ money into kids' videos. So, either PMax's AI is about as great as Google's AI overviews, and was mistaking accidental toddler clicks for real performance, or PMax is just a fancy cover for Google doing whatever they want with advertiser dollars.

So it’s great that advertisers can now check Google’s work, and make sure that, say, a law firm client isn’t showing people drowning to toddlers.

But here’s where it gets sticky. PMax doesn’t place video ads just on YouTube, it also places them across the Google Video Partners network, where we documented how Google places ads on inventory that directly goes against its promises to advertisers. 
Sites that publish disinformation and sites that are sanctioned by the US government were apparently fair game for PMax inventory.

Surely this new Performance Max transparency effort applies to the GVP network too, right? Weeeeeeeelllllll we’d love to say “yes,” but Google was incredibly dodgy when we asked them, so we don’t know.

To be clear, this is a BIG win for us. Adtech has too many black-box products that leave advertisers questioning where their money went. It’s an industry making money off of using garbage data to reach fake people.

We spent weeks last year hounding Google over a similar opacity issue in its Google Search Partners program and showing how it was playing Whac-a-Mole with its own bad inventory. Eventually, the search giant caved and cracked the door open for some — but again, not all — placement reporting.

The increased GVP and GSP transparency means we’re now two-for-three in these things-we-need-to-fix slides from one of Arielle’s presentations.

So until we can figure out what exactly is covered in the new placement report, take Google’s word with a grain of salt.

More from Arielle: Google says ‘informed choice’ is the future and we are holding them to it.

COPPA friends close, and your enemies KOSA

The Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) this week, and it’s a real mixed bag.

First, COPPA 2.0. It’s an update to a 1998 law that set privacy protections for kids by barring collecting advertising data on kids younger than 13, unless they had their parents’ permission.

If you, like me, always thought, “Huh, it’s a little weird that advertisers can start collecting data on 14-year-olds,” it turns out we weren’t alone. As Kevin Collier explained for NBC News, COPPA 2.0 raises that age limit to 17, unless they consent. It also tries to fix a loophole that lets companies track kids if they can say they didn’t know they were kids, while expanding what counts as personal information to include biometric data.

These changes are “necessary for COPPA to be effective,” Arielle Garcia says. Kids shouldn’t have to worry about advertisers looking over their shoulder. After all, we live in a world where Target can figure out when a teen is pregnant before her father knows.

KOSA is a bit trickier. It’s meant to address worries some parents have over how social media affects children, but could end up making social media platforms preemptively scrub “controversial” content. And as we’ve seen, women’s health and LGBTQ and abortion rights are often deemed controversial in public discourse.

The bill’s next stop is the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson previously said he supports it.

Bossin’ around in Boston

Safe travels to Claire, who is heading to Boston to speak at the AdMonsters Publisher Forum! Her Monday keynote is going to explain how we can all make the advertising system better through transparency (sounds familiar!).

If you’re in Boston and want to go, you can register at www.admonsters.com/boston and get a discount with the code SPEAKERFRIEND.

That’s all for us for this week! Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back in your inboxes soon.

 Peace,

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