SEARCHING FOR SOLUTIONS

The search giant has been explaining how it is tackling problems with advertising and content. But the lines are not always clear, writes Austyn Allison

HOW GOOGLE I S TAKING ON ‘ BAD ACTORS’ I N ADVERTISING AND PUBLISHING.

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ast month, Google called together 18 journalists from across Europe and the Middle East to its European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.

The official reason for the congregation was to give the press some background on Google’s ad offerings, with a specific focus on brand safety. Back in March, the search giant had come in for unpleasant criticism when it turned out that the ad-placement algorithms on its YouTube video streaming platform had been juxtaposing wholesome family brands with terrorist recruitment videos. The company is keen to show how it has tackled the many issues this raised.

So the meeting was also effectively a war briefing to give an update on the ongoing struggle between Google and ‘bad actors’, as its management likes to call those seeking to misuse its services.

However, the company doesn’t just struggle with ad fraudsters, copyright thieves, sellers of illegal or immoral services, posters of criminal and upsetting content and their ilk. It also has to deal with more innocent offenders. The ads and content that don’t fit within the guidelines, the accidental clicks, the badly written program that generates false traffic without malice, and so on.

Andres Ferrate, Google’s chief AdSpam advocate (pictured, opposite page, centre), says: “Google is investing in defending our ad systems against invalid traffic because we are at this interesting intersection of advertisers, publishers and users. And being at the intersection of all of those stakeholders, we believe that trust is the standard type of currency with which we are transacting.”

Google has numerous platforms and vehicles through which it interacts with those three parties. The three it focused on most at the Dublin meeting were its search advertising services, its Google Display Network and YouTube.

There is often overlap between users, advertisers and publishers. Indeed the three can easily be the same person. For example, a marketing manager who puts a video of his product on YouTube, searches Google for rival brands and buys space through the DoubleClick ad exchange.

While Google’s response to bad actors needs to be firm enough to discourage them, the war they are fighting needn’t be to-the-death, and the platform’s responses need to be measured and proportionate, generally stopping short of drastic measures such as criminal proceedings and exclusion from further use of its services.

Although the team in Dublin admit that a largely automated system, overseeing an almost incon- ceivable amount of data, will never be perfect, it shouldn’t happen again that brands’ ads will appear next to terror videos.

Measures to increase security include more sophisticated labelling of content. With 400 hours of YouTube videos being uploaded every minute, Google handles too much information for humans to oversee everything. But for 15 years it has been using machine learning and artificial intelligence to monitor the internet, including its own properties.

Not only is that AI constantly improving, but Google is also continuously re-evaluating its policies on what is acceptable content. Jessica Stansfield, EMEA head of global product policy (pictured, right), is keen to emphasise that constant evaluation doesn’t necessarily mean constant change; Google doesn’t necessarily keep shifting the goalposts, but it is always asking itself whether the goalposts are in the right place.

It has tightened up the defaults of what an ad can be served against when it is uploaded. Advertisers are free to add or exclude categories they would like to associate with or avoid (think sports, news, graphic violence, religion…) but if a video is posted unlabelled, the default setting is that no ads will run against it. Nor will ads be served now on YouTube channels with fewer than 10,000 views, meaning that video posters must have at least bit of a track record before they can start monetising their content.

It can be difficult to categorise videos, as the same footage can be interpreted in a lot of different ways.