The Instagram campaign deliberately targeted a group of users labelled as “unknown” in its advertising system, which Google knew skewed towards under-18s, these people said. Meanwhile, documents seen by the FT suggest steps were taken to ensure the true intent of the campaign was disguised.
The project disregarded Google’s rules that prohibit personalising and targeting ads to under-18s, including serving ads based on demographics. It also has policies against the circumvention of its own guidelines, or “proxy targeting”.
…However, Google did not deny using the “unknown” loophole, adding: “We’ll also be taking additional action to reinforce with sales representatives that they must not help advertisers or agencies run campaigns attempting to work around our policies.”
Yup, those crafty sales reps orchestrated a multimillion dollar agreement between a chief competitor. While also adapting the code to find the gaps and target the desired under 18s.
As always with these massive corporate failures/crimes it turns out no one in any important position knew anything and it was a small group of low-level bad actors causing all the trouble. How sad that all these companies are plagued with this while the leadership is just trying to virtuously do good business!
