• Google has shared its latest Ads Safety Report for 2023, where it blocked or removed 5.5 billion bad ads that violated its terms.
• The report also noted that generative AI poses significant opportunities in terms of digital advertising, but challenges too.
• With so many elections happening in 2024, Google will also be scrutinising political ads this year.

Google either removed or blocked a mammoth 5.5 billion bad ads in 2023, all of which were from advertisers deemed to have flouted the company’s rules as it pertains to using its platforms in order to facilitate digital advertising.

This information was shared in Google’s latest Ads Safety Report, with an estimated 1.04 billion of the 5.5 billion being viewed as an abuse of its advertising network. Other bad ads include ones that infringed upon trademark and personalisation, at 548.2 million and 372 million respectively in 2023.

One of the key elements, perhaps unsurprisingly given how much attention has been poured into Gemini of late, is the impact of generative AI when it comes to digital advertising.

Here Google was quick to acknowledge that it presented as many opportunities as it does challenges, and companies like Google will need to have the correct processes in place to deal with a sector that is in the midst of a significant change.

“The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on,” it highlighted in a release sent to Hypertext.

“Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online,” it added.

“Traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds,” the company continued.

Political advertising is another area that Google focused on in 2023, and this segment is set to intensify this year given the sheer volume of national elections happening across the globe, including here in South Africa too.

 In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification,” Google explained.

With owners of other large social media platforms, such as Meta, also announcing plans as it relates to political ads, it will be interesting to see how effectively Google will be able to root out bad ads to ensure they do not have the opportunity to unduly influence upcoming elections.

“We’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes,” it advised.

While Google is hopeful that genAI will prove a vital tool in keeping pace with an ever-evolving advertising landscape, it looks like consumers and internet users will need to be more vigilant when accessing whether they’re seeing bad ads or not.

“When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers,” Google concluded.

To download (PDF) and read the report for yourself, head here.

[Image – Photo by Hrushikesh Chavan on Unsplash]