FT: Meta and Google had secret ad deal to target teens on YouTube

Meta and Google ran a now-canceled secret campaign on YouTube that deliberately targeted teenagers with Instagram ads, the Financial Times says, thus breaking Alphabet’s own rules against advertising to children.

Documents seen by the Financial Times suggest that Google worked on a marketing project for Meta, designed to target 13- to 17-year-old YouTube users with ads promoting Instagram, Meta’s photo and video app.

Google allegedly directed advertisements to a subset of users labeled as “unknown” in its advertising systems, attempting to disguise the group skewed toward teenagers.

Google Ads help page itself says that the “unknown” category refers to people whose age, gender, parental status, or household income are supposedly unidentified. In theory, this could allow ad buyers to reach a wider audience.

However, according to FT, Google could use app downloads and online activity to determine “with a high degree of confidence” that the “unknown” group actually mostly consisted of younger users.

The corporation staffers supposedly used the loophole to skirt Google’s own policies of blocking ad targeting based on age, gender, or interests of people under 18. The rules have been in place since 2021.

The program was initiated amid a decline in Google's advertising earnings and, of course, the migration of Meta’s younger users to platforms like the fast-growing TikTok, FT said.

According to a 2021 report by The New York Times, Instagram has been extremely worried about losing teen users and previously allocated its entire marketing budget to targeting the 13- to 15-year-old “early high school” segment.

The project was already trialed in the US in May. Both companies saw the initiative as a success and had planned to expand it further but abruptly canceled the project after FT contacted Google.

“We prohibit ads being personalized to people under 18, period,” Google said in a statement to the publication. “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.”

Last week, the Senate overwhelmingly passed the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that would place a duty of care on social media platforms to protect children from harmful online content.