- The European Parliament said it’s auditing its YouTube advertising from 2020 to date.
- It follows a study that alleged YouTube misled advertisers with a third-party ad placement program.
- Google has disputed the findings of that study.
The European Parliament is auditing its Google advertising going as far back as 2020 following a report that alleged YouTube placed ads on third-party sites that violated its own standards.
The report, from the ad verification company Adalytics, said that YouTube may have misled dozens of advertisers — from Fortune 500 brands to government entities like the European Parliament and US federal agencies — with its YouTube TrueView skippable in-stream ad product.
Google has disputed the findings of the study.
TrueView skippable in-stream ads are served on YouTube.com and the YouTube app, as well as third-party websites as part of the Google Video Partner Network, or GVP Network. Google’s policies state the ads need to appear in-stream — played with a video player that a user is already viewing — and the video play must be initiated by the user. They also need to be skippable and audible.
The study, which analyzed ads for more than 1,100 brands between 2020 and 2023, found that up to 80% of TrueView in-stream skippable ads served on the GVP Network violated those policies. Adalytics observed these TrueView ads served on low-quality sites were autoplaying, with the sound turned off, and within “out-stream” video slots that were often out of view to the user. The Adalytics study honed in on ads marked as “completed views,” which the advertisers would have been billed for.
“Immediately after the publication of the report by Adalytics that you mention, relevant EP services have been looking into how the European Parliament’s promoted content might have been affected. This evaluation process is still ongoing,” said a European Parliament press representative in an emailed statement.
The representative said that the European Parliament had already “drastically limited” its YouTube investments on the GVP Network since October 2022 and halted spending there altogether in 2023.
“For the period between 2020 and 2022, EP services are still collecting the relevant data to properly assess the situation as well as auditing Parliament’s official accounts in order to assess possible misplacements by Google,” the statement continued. From its initial assessment, the use of the GVP Network by the European Parliament was “residual,” the representative said.
A Google spokesperson pointed Insider to a blog post published by Google’s director for global video solutions Marvin Renaud in response to the Adalytics report on July 13. In the post, an update from its initial June response, Renaud said the researchers used a “faulty methodology” that “grossly misled advertisers, agencies and the broader public.” Adalytics said it stands by the report and its findings.
The European Parliament has been put under pressure to suspend all of its Google advertising. A coalition of 24 MEPs sent a letter to its president Roberta Metsola earlier this month, which also said she should seek compensation from Google if there was reason to believe it had misled Parliament over its ad buys.
TrueView ads were found on Russian website sites like Pravda.ru, a site that has been classified as publishing Russian disinformation and other ads served on websites and apps from publishers potentially under sanctions by the likes of the US Treasury, the report says.
“Although the precise amount of money spent by the Parliament on these websites is unclear, we can never tolerate to actively fund dictators, sleazy companies, and terrorists,” the MEPs wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Insider. “This deeply damages the credibility of this house and all of the values it represents.”
The Google spokesperson said that upon review, Pravda.ru had been demonetized from its network. The spokesperson added that its current publisher policies already strictly prohibit content that incites violence, disparages or promotes hate against a group of people, and denies the existence of tragic events. Google also stopped monetization on Russian state-funded media and stopped serving ads in Russia or from Russian-based advertisers shortly after the war began in Ukraine, the spokesperson said.
Other advertisers and their agencies have sought to limit their GVP Network exposure in the wake of the Adalytics report, Adweek reported, while some ad buyers have said Google should issue refunds for any invalid ad placements, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“So far, Google’s response has been subpar as they try to brush off the findings of the Adalytics report as inadequate without detailed feedback or evidence to counter its claims,” said Ruben Schreurs, chief product officer of the marketing and media consultancy Ebiquity, which received an advance copy of the Adalytics study.
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