• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 10, 2025

Google had offered to give buyers thousands of dollars in ad credits to test its AI-powered Demand Gen tool for two months in a push to encourage widespread adoption. But this marketing tactic ultimately could heighten tensions across the industry.

One small company is calling foul based on what it views as monopolistic practices, and suggests what the industry really needs is to bring back transparency.

"It underscores a central tension in today’s ad-tech ecosystem, where advertisers are concerned about the increasing use of 'black box' algorithms," according to Bradley Keefer, CRO of Keen Decision Systems, an AI-powered marketing mix model (MMM) company. 

The approach of attempting to pay advertisers to use Google’s technology reflects growing concerns over whether it will monetarily incentivize advertisers to try its other platforms -- including Meridian, an open-source MMM developed by Google.

Meridian was released in 2024 in limited beta, and was made available to all marketers in January 2025.

Keefer believes the industry needs solutions that are open and fosters data-driven decisions are free from hidden bias.

By enabling advertisers to see how and why an algorithm prioritizes content, marketers can build automated systems that advertisers and consumers can trust.

"Transparency remains a concern whenever large tech firms leverage AI for campaign optimization," Keefer said. "Whether it’s Demand Gen from Google or a new AI layer in Microsoft Advertising, each walled garden promises faster results while offering limited insight into how it allocates budgets or selects audiences. Publishers typically share only top-line metrics, not the granular data advertisers need to verify the mechanics driving those results."

He added that clean rooms are positioned as a privacy-safe way for advertisers to verify or augment platform-reported performance, but in theory they allow brands to match first-party data with platform exposure data without disclosing user-level details to either side.

Advertisers, which have pressured platforms to provide more transparency about their ads, are asking for more data and what triggers content. In Google’s case, they are saying they want more transparency around what triggers AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Amazon, Microsoft and others have begun to understand that logic. Where Amazon made updates to its demand-side platform (DSP) that included new page-level reporting through its Traffic Events API to further strengthen brand-safety controls, Microsoft began testing transparency in a feature that explains ad-placement decisions in Bing’s search results.

The feature serves up varying details depending on the user or region. It appears in a drop-down option next to ad URLs in Bing search results.

Users click the drop-down arrow next to a search ad’s URL to access a dialog box that explains why the technology picked the advertisement to serve up in results.