Meta and Google teamed up in a secret campaign to deliberately target 13 to 17-year-olds based on Instagram ads on YouTube Financial Timesbreaking the search giant’s own rules banning advertising to children.
The publication reported that Google targeted ads to a small group of users marked as “unknown” in its ad system in an attempt to hide the fact that this group was skewed toward teenagers. According to the Google Ads help page, the “unknown” demographic category refers to people whose age, gender, parental status, or household income is unknown, and when selected allows advertisers to reach a “broader audience.”
However, Google was reportedly able to use app downloads and online activity to determine with “a high degree of confidence” that the “unknown” group consisted of younger users. Financial Times. Google employees allegedly exploited this vulnerability to circumvent the company’s own policies, introducing rules as early as 2021 that prohibited ad targeting based on “the age, gender, or interests of people under 18 years of age.”
Spark Foundry, the U.S. subsidiary of advertising giant Publicis, reportedly worked with the companies to launch illegal marketing campaigns in Canada between February and April this year, before piloting the program in the U.S. in May. According to the agency, Meta and Google intend to expand the campaign to international markets and promote other services such as Facebook. Financial Times. The plan was launched against the backdrop of declining advertising revenue from Google and a shift of Meta’s younger users to rival services such as TikTok.
Google has since launched an investigation into the allegations, and the event has now been cancelled. Financial Times Report. “We prohibit serving personalized ads to those under 18,” Google said in a statement to the publication. “We will also take additional action to emphasize to sales representatives that they must not help advertisers or agencies attempt to circumvent Activities of our policy.”
