Will worldwide ad boycott force Google to grow up?
After Google allowed ads to appear alongside the most hateful content on the web, it’s time the company faces up to its responsibilities
ON St. Patrick’s Day, executives at ad buying giant Havas filed into their London offices for another day at work — and discovered some very unpleasant news. Ads that they had paid Google to place across its many digital properties were popping up attached to videos from some of the Internet’s most active hate mongers — including white nationalists such as David Duke, animalrights extremists and ISIS. They were not happy. One ad, for Oracle and NetSuite, featuring smiling office workers, was displayed prominently on a video of two men carrying an ISIS flag. Another, for Walmart, sat atop a fierce masked man crouching next to dogs. While the ad world has long harbored resentment toward Google for its secretive ways, the videos were more than Havas could stomach. Havas’ UKboss, Paul Frampton, immediately yanked all of his clients’ commercials from the web giant. “We have a duty of care to our clients in the UK marketplace . . . where we can be assured that that environment is safe, regulated to the degree necessary and additive to their brands’ objectives,” Frampton said in a statement. Days later, Google apologized and promised to fix the problem — but it wasn’t enough. Within a week, AT&T, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, Walmart, General Motors, Starbucks, Verizon, JPMorgan Chase and other mega-advertisers had followed suit, pulling their ads from Google’s platforms in the US. It was a moment of reckoning for Google. After years of happily banking ever-expanding ad budgets, the world’s second-biggest company was on notice.
GOOGLE, the search engine, and its subsidiaries like YouTube have always insisted that they are simply a platform that serves content or ads. But suddenly that excuse wasn’t cutting it anymore.
“They’ve always maintained they were sort of digital engineers standing there with their digital [wrenches], trying to tighten the nuts on their digital pipes and not being responsible for the content that was going through the pipes,” Martin Sorrell, chief executive of the WPP Group, the biggest advertiser in the world with $102 billion in client ad money, said on CNBC.
But after the Havas snafu, “They can’t just say, ‘Look, we’re a technology company, we have nothing to do with the content that is appearing on our digital pages.’ ”
In fact, many industry leaders are now charging that Google and other tech giants, like Facebook, aren’t just web platforms; they’re publishers — like a news organization or a TV network — and they must shoulder the responsibility that comes with that role. “Wehave always said Google, Facebook and others are media companies and have the same responsibilities as any other media company,” Sorrell said.
With brands including Google Maps and its Gmail service, Google has a market cap of $562.4 billion and it controls 41 percent of the $83 billion US digital ad market. (Facebook controls 14.7 percent of the US digital ad business, according to eMarketer.) But its once-impenetrable brand equity is now in danger of evaporating, at least with a growing band of major advertisers.
Traditionally, marketers spend considerable time and energy ensuring media outlets don’t run their ads next to clashing content. Fast-food ads, for example, are expected not to run alongside stories about dieting or diabetes. Airlines typically tell TV news outlets to drop their ads from breaks when plane crashes are reported.
But online? It’s a whole other story. There are few checks and balances.
Google argues it can never guarantee where ads land, because it’s contending with 400 hours of content uploaded every minute. Google also operates YouTube, one of the biggest destinations online offering advertisers a billion hours of viewing content per