Google has promised a wide-ranging overhaul of its advertising policies in response to a growing boycott of the company’s platforms from leading brands and advertisers including the UK government, Marks & Spencer and McDonald’s.
In a blogpost published on Monday night, Philipp Schindler, the company’s chief business officer, wrote: “We have strict policies that define where Google ads should appear, and in the vast majority of cases, our policies and tools work as intended. But at times we don’t get it right.
“Recently, we had a number of cases where brands’ ads appeared on content that was not aligned with their values. For this, we deeply apologize.”
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Many of the companies involved in the boycott had discovered that their advertising spend was being used to place banner adverts over YouTube videos from groups such as Britain First, indirectly funding extremists and damaging the prestige of their brands.
In response, Schindler has promised a three-tier overhaul of Google’s advertising policies, both on YouTube and on the company’s wider ad products.
First, Google itself is going to tighten its policies around what can live on its platforms, and what subset of that content can support advertising on it. “Starting today, we’re taking a tougher stance on hateful, offensive and derogatory content,” Schindler says. The company is also ensuring that fake creators — those who impersonate other channels — can’t host advertising. Schindler also says YouTube is “taking a hard look” at existing community guidelines to see if any content is allowed on the platform that shouldn’t be, though no action is promised.
Second, the company is promising better controls for advertisers to choose where their money goes, and to prevent accidentally spending it on hateful content. The default options for advertisers will be tightened, to exclude “potentially objectionable” content from the off. Advertisers themselves will be given account-level…