Following an announcement made by YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in December to combat inappropriate content from being seen alongside branded content, the video streaming giant is now making major changes to how ads are being vetted that are displayed alongside their premium videos.
Here's What You Need to Know
This new initiative will target Google Preferred, a set of popular YouTube channels that are sold advertisement placements to marketers at a higher price. In addition to a new AI that has been built to help aid the process, an additional 10,000 YouTube employees have also been employed to monitor content that’s deemed too inappropriate for branded ads.
An Alphabet Inc.’s spokeswoman recently emailed Bloomberg Technology to explain the change:
“We built Google Preferred to help our customers easily reach YouTube’s most passionate audiences and we’ve seen strong traction in the last year with a record number of brands. As we said recently, we are discussing and seeking feedback from our brand partners on ways to offer them even more assurances for what they buy in the Upfronts.”
The Upfronts is designed to create hype and excitement for brands and advertisers. It’s a sales process that helps marketers and media buyers better plan their campaigns by pre-purchasing spots in advance.
The Backstory
Google has been under a lot of scrutiny lately from advertisers due to the offensive YouTube content that has been getting paired up with their ads. Last year, the platform had ads pulled from some of their most significant advertisers as a result.
This change is one of several that has taken place in recent weeks, with Facebook announcing that they would be doing a major overhaul on how advertisements are displayed on users newsfeeds.