Marketers buying search ads on Google don’t know what they don’t know. And because Google doesn’t provide transparency into the URLs they are buying through Google Search Partners, they’re ending up a wide array of unsavory sites, from pornography sites to right-wing fringe publishers to sites run within sanctioned countries, such as Iran and Russia.
Adalytics Founder Krzysztof Franaszek took a group of reporters – including our senior editor, James Hercher – on a tour of the worst of the worst. Marketers couldn’t know they were buying Google Search ads in these places, because its network list isn’t transparent and neither is Google Performance Max, its other AI-driven blind buying tool.
A lack of transparency and the loose controls inherent in a platform model are putting marketers in dark places not only on Google Search, but also on random sites on the YouTube network. And X and Meta are both battling scandals in which nonprofit and advocacy groups created user profiles that behaved like a neo-Nazi and a pedophile, respectively, and those users were predictably showed ads adjacent to the kind of content their type of person would consume. What is a marketer to do?
On today’s podcast, we dive deep into the Adalytics report, look at how marketers are reacting to the problem and discuss the likelihood of platform murkiness ever getting filtered out.
I think you want something like “array” here, not “assortment,” since assortment (meaning a miscellaneous grouping) can be a big or small number of things, while “array” means a large quantity of something.
