YouTube advertisers may received billions in refunds after a study showed viewers could completely avoid commercials hosted on Google’s TrueView ad serving offering, violating the company’s own terms of service.
Adalytics issued a report claiming “advertisers including Fortune 500 brands, the US federal government, and many small businesses may have been misled for years about Google’s proprietary TrueView skippable in-stream video ads.”
TrueView is Google’s “proprietary cost-per-view, choice-based ad format that serves on YouTube, millions of apps, and across the web.” Google claims that advertisers only pay “for actual views of their ads, rather than impressions” when using TrueView.
Google’s policies state TrueView ads must be skippable, audible, and users cannot simply scroll through it.
Adalytics claims its research report finds “that for years, significant quantities of TrueView skippable in-stream ads, purchased by many different brands and media agencies, appear to have been served on hundreds of thousands of websites and apps in which the consumer experience did not meet Google’s stated quality standards.
“For example, many TrueView in-stream ads were served muted and auto-playing as out-stream video or as obscured video players on independent sites. Often, there was little to no organic video media content between ads, the video units simply played ads only.”
The report estimates this media buyers were duped out of “billions of digital ad dollars, which were ultimately spent on small, muted, out-stream, auto-playing or interstitial video ad units running on independent websites and mobile apps.”
Adalytics claims Fortune 500 brands might spend upwards of $75,000 on a TrueView campaign.
Among the brands that have launched TrueView campaigns through YouTube are Samsung, Disney+, Dyson, HP, Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Microsoft, IBM, HBO Max, Google itself (through its Google Career Certificates and Google Workspace Domains), Netgear, Ebay, Adobe, and TikTok.
Not to mention the United States federal government, the European Parliament, and the New York City Mayor’s office.
Google has, not surprisingly, denied the claims.
“A recent report by a third party used unreliable sampling and proxy methodologies and made extremely inaccurate claims about the Google Video Partner (GVP) network,” said Marvin Renaud, Google’s Director of Global Video Solutions.
“The report wrongly implies that most campaign spend runs on GVP rather than YouTube. That’s just not right. The overwhelming majority of video ad campaigns serve on YouTube. Video advertisers can also run ads on GVP, a separate network of third-party sites, to reach additional audiences, if it helps them meet their business objectives.”
“This is an unacceptable breach of trust by YouTube,” Joshua Lowcock, global chief media officer at ad agency UM Worldwide, told The Wall Street Journal.
“Google must fix this and fully refund clients for any fraud and impressions that failed to meet Google’s own policies.”
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