• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, December 10, 2024

The European Union (EU) is probing deeper into a secret Google and Meta partnership that targeted Instagram ads to minors.

We learn this as GroupM released its forecast estimating that overall, digital ads could make up as much as 82% of total revenue next year -- and that Google, Meta, ByteDance, Amazon and Alibaba are projected to capture more than half of the global advertising market.

The estimates come from GroupM. The WPP media agency also forecasts growth to exceed $1 trillion in revenue for the first time in 2024.

Global ad revenues are forecast to rise by 9.5%, with further growth of 7.7% in 2025. The U.S. market is forecast to become the largest, reaching $379 billion.

The Financial Times, which used the code name Tangerine Owl to describe the partnership, reported the update Tuesday.  

In August, the FT unraveled the project, which it said targeted 13- to 17-year-olds who use YouTube to promote Meta's Instagram. It ignored Google’s rules on how minors should be treated online. The research revealed that Google employees had advised Meta on how to bypass Google’s ad policies for minors. 

“The safeguards we have to protect teens, like prohibiting ad personalization, are industry leading and continue to work,” a Google spokesperson told MediaPost. “We’ve held updated internal trainings to ensure our sales teams remain aware of our policies and technical protections.”

Google had confirmed following the August investigation that its policies prohibiting personalized advertising to users under 18 worked properly. The company has since updated its training to ensure its sales representatives understood they are prohibited from assisting advertisers in trying to specifically target sensitive audiences via proxies and attempting to circumvent its policies.

Age targeting is a common advertising tool that allows campaigns to reach potential customers who are likely to be within a particular age range. “Unknown” category, which was used, refers to a wide audience of people whose age, gender, parental status, or household income are not identified for the advertisers. 

Though Google will still show these users ads, the category of Unknown can include instances where users are not signed in, when Google respects a user’s choice to turn off personalization, or for users where protection is enabled. Unknown is an option when advertisers want to expand the reach of their campaigns. 

It is surely a complex situation and likely the decision of select employees.

As reported in August, the two companies worked with Spark Foundry, a U.S. subsidiary of French ad company Publicis, to launch the pilot campaign in Canada between February and April, according to people and documents seen by FT.  

Google has since strengthened its policies, prohibiting demographic targeting of the “unknown” group and mandating staff to acknowledge the responsibilities. The campaign has since been terminated, but was initially piloted in Canada and later expanded to the U.S.

The Commission has yet to open a formal investigation, but continues to build on what it requested in October. That information includes things like internal chats, presentations, emails and other things related to YouTube ads.