Waging A War Against Bad Advertisements

Digital’s dawn is finally here as, according to various industry forecasts, it is all set to overtake television in global share of ad spend in 2018. However, while digital has been growing, this year has also seen the conversation for digital move towards demands for more accountability and transparency in the medium from brand owners.

- Shubhi Tandon

IN February 2017, Google was in the news for the wrong reasons. After some advertisers in the UK found their ads placed next to extremist content on YouTube, many brands pulled out of advertising on the platform altogether, raising calls for brand safety. Facebook too had its share of issues with advertisers late last year after it admitted that its measurements were not reported correctly. These issues are affecting the growth in digital ad spend as brand owners are now asking for more accountability and transparency in the medium.

Says World Federation of Advertisers CEO Stephan Loerke, “We are alarmed by the level of customer frustration with online advertising. In the long term, this is putting at risk the quality of advertising’s reach to consumers and the effectiveness of the medium.”

Following these developments, industry body Coalition for Better Ads released Better Ads Standards in March 2017 for desktop and mobile web to improve the standards of advertising.

Adopting Better Standards

In June 2017, Google joined the Coalition for Better Ads and announced that new updates for its browser Chrome will filter out ads that do not follow the standards. This essentially means it will not allow ‘bad ads’ — that interrupt, distract or clutter — to load by 2018.