You may have heard back in March of this year that giant media firms in the UK got together to boycott ad placements on Google’s Display and Youtube networks causing advertisers around the world to wonder about the effectiveness of their own Google display campaigns.
The concern of these media buying agencies is that their clients’ ads are too often published next to inappropriate content. These agencies argue that Google’s automated systems are not doing enough to guarantee the proper classification and filtering of publisher content. But does the responsibility of placements rely only on Google’s systems or are some agencies just not properly managing and tweaking their clients’ campaigns?
It goes without saying that Google needs to do everything possible to filter out garbage placements, and in response to the boycott they quickly implemented new more stringent measures to improve the quality of publishers. That being said, however, trying to properly optimize a display campaign by relying only on automated systems is not a good practice. That would be the equivalent of running an important document through Google translator and sending it off without a person who speaks the language reviewing it. Well run campaigns take time to run – there are no shortcuts.
Large agencies need to put their big boy pants on and put the work in or get out of the way!