Google is addressing transparency and oversight issues for advertisers and search partners after last year’s report from Adalytics suggested instances where ads were displayed on pornographic websites and those affiliated with sanctioned companies in Iran and Russia.

“After deep consultation with our advertising partners, we’ve decided to unify our brand suitability preferences so that account level placement exclusions will apply to the Search partner network, in addition to YouTube and Display, starting next month," said a Google spokesperson. "We will also offer impression level placement reporting for Search partner network sites in PMax campaigns.” 

Placement exclusions allow advertisers to exclude ads from serving on placements for specific pages, sites, mobile apps, and videos to follow brand-suitability guidelines, with supports for Search and Shopping, Display and Video, Travel and Hotel inventory.

This suitability setting now works for all of an advertisers' campaigns that appear on YouTube, Display network, Search partner network (which was just added), and Google Video Partners.

All campaigns include Performance Max (PMax) along with video, display, or any other campaigns where the ad appears on the platforms listed here.

The changes to the search network -- which will begin to roll out March 4 -- are based on a 30-day sample, including more than 90% of Search Partner Network impressions from Top 100 sites and apps, including YouTube.

Google says that ProSE, the focus of the 2023 Adalytics report, represents a fraction of Search Partner Network impressions -- less than 1% based on a 30-day sample.

Google believes that Adalytics made "wildly exaggerated claim" by trying to generate as many negative ad placements as they could, but Google's analysis found those placements rarely occurred before they intentionally triggered them.

ProSE is a Google product used by thousands of nonprofits, education institutions and other websites that gives them a free search experience directly on their sites. It is a free, ad-supported way for websites to add a custom search box to their web pages and show fast, relevant results powered by Google Search.

Websites that enable ProSE have clear Terms of Service they must follow, which prohibits Adult Content. Those that have violations lose their ability to use the platform.

Google's analysis of the report did not identify ad revenue being shared with a single sanctioned entity.

And based on feedback in December, Google said it stopped serving ads on certain ProSE sites with negligible traffic where there was no revenue sharing.

Transparency has become an issue with Google according to advertisers and the non-profit Check My Ads. The ad-tech watchdog accused Google of “running search ads on brand unsafe — and sometimes illegal inventory through the platform."

“Google urges advertisers to use GSP, a network of ‘vetted’ non-Google websites and YouTube channels, to reach more customers across the web,” Check My Ads wrote in a blog post. “But they have never allowed advertisers to find out which websites they were running on — or how much they were spending on each of them.”

An astounding 99% of marketers are using AI in some form and want to do more.

Yet many continue to struggle with tasks where AI might help, according to the Braze Customer Engagement Review, a study conducted by Wakefield Research.

Of the marketers surveyed, 98% face challenges to creativity and strategy, despite their tiny steps in using AI. They cite four parallel issues: 

• Emphasis on KPIs, which inhibits a focus on creativity — 42%
• Too much time spent on business-as-usual execution and tasks — 42%
• Lack of technology to execute creative ideas — 41%
• Hard to demonstrate ROI impact of creativity — 40% 

Yet 79% of marketers are confident AI can automate routine tasks and free up time for creative thinking. They hope to deploy AI for the following:

• Generate creative ideas — 48%
• Automate repetitive tasks — 47%
• Optimize strategies in real time — 47%
• Enhance data analysis — 47%
• Power predictive analytics — 45%
• Personalize campaigns — 44%

Another creative hurdle is that many brands lack a clear view of their customers and the ability to act on the data they do have. The respondents say they: 

• Export performance feedback to business-intelligence platforms to generate advanced analytics — 50%
• Sync performance with insights generated by other platforms in the business — 48%
• Apply their customer insights to their product and brand/creative strategy — 6%

In addition, only 24% are mapping customer behavior and sentiment. 

However, a mere 22% of brands are focused solely on upstream metrics like opens and clicks. Of those polled, 54% are also boost downstream metrics like retention and monetization. 

Email came in a close second among the channels being used:

• Messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Line or KakaoTalk — 47%
• Email — 45%
• Mobile and web push — 43%
• Targeted app or web content — 41%
• Paid media powered by first-party data — 41%
• In-app/in-browser messaging — 40%

“Marketers are utilizing the power of AI to ignite creativity and craft personalized experiences that resonate with today’s consumer,” concludes Astha Malik, chief business officer of Braze. “And by tapping into valuable first-party data and fostering cross-functional collaboration, marketers can transform this data into captivating campaigns that build loyalty and growth.”

Wakefield Research surveyed 1,900 marketing executives across three global regions — the Americas, APAC and EMEA — in December 2023. 

Supply-side advertising-technology platform Pubmatic grew 14% in fourth-quarter revenues to $84.6 million versus the same period a year ago -- overdelivering on expectations. 

Net income was up 46% to $18.7 million.

Tuesday morning trading of Pubmatic’s stock -- a day after its earnings release -- was up 28% to $21.31.  

Video business from desktop, mobile and connected TV (CTV) devices grew 7% year-over-year.

Overall revenue from mobile display and video represent 78% of total revenue for the year. Pubmatic offered first-quarter revenue guidance of between $61 million and $63 million.

Pubmatic witnessed its CTV inventory growing to 271 publishers -- up from 214 publishers during the same period a year before.

New or expanded programmatic inventory partnerships included AMC Networks, Dish Media, Fox Corp., TiVo and Vevo. It also grew a technology partnership with ad server Freewheel.

During the call with analysts on Monday, the company said its publishers continue to transition from third-party cookie-based identifiers to other alternative identity graphs including those from LiveRamp and The Trade Desk (Unified ID 2.0).

Pubmatic said over 80% of its impressions had alternative identity graphs. 

Looking at more than 600 billion ad impressions, PubMatic said that when alternative IDs are present, publisher revenue increased by 16%.

The company also works with publishers to reduce the number of ad-technology companies they are working with -- a strategy called supply path optimization (SPO). The company says 45% of its total activity on its platform comes from SPO -- up from just 34% a year ago.

A Microsoft-backed generative AI company, Mistral, on Monday unveiled a new model that the company's founder Arthur Mensch, a former Google employee, said can perform some “reasoning” tasks comparably with OpenAI GPT-4, and Gemini Ultra.  

Mistral’s GAI model, Mistral Large, is open-sourced and being made available on its platform and through Microsoft Azure Cloud services, the company's first distributor partner.

Brad Smith, Microsoft president, announced new AI Access Principles at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This was part of the effort to address Microsoft’s growing role and responsibility as an AI innovator and market leader.

“This new AI economy is creating not just new opportunities for existing enterprises, but new companies and entirely new business categories,” Smith wrote in a blog post. “The principles we’re announcing today commit Microsoft to bigger investments, more business partnerships, and broader programs to promote innovation and competition than any prior initiative in the company’s 49-year history.”

This occurred several days after Google faced a backlash in response to its AI chatbot Gemini generating ethnically diverse images of historical characters such as Vikings, popes, and even the founders of the company. 

Smith announced the investment in Mistral and said the investments and programs announced Monday put the company’s principles into practice -- not only in Europe and in the United States, but worldwide.

Mistral Large has native multilingual capacities. It strongly outperforms LLaMA 2 70B on HellaSwag, Arc Challenge and MMLU benchmarks in French, German, Spanish and Italian.

In terms of “reasoning” -- the ability to think logically and reach conclusions -- Mistral said the model reaches top-tier reasoning capabilities, and can be used for complex multilingual reasoning tasks including text understanding, transformation, and code generation.

Mistral Large achieves strong results on commonly used benchmarks, making it the world's second-ranked model available through an API next to GPT-4.

Ericsson, a telecommunications services company, describes machine reasoning as an “attempt to implement abstract thinking” and “apply human-like common sense to analyze large amounts of data

Mistral has raised more than $500 million from investors based on that ability. The investors also include Andreessen Horowitz.

And while the funding amount is much less than competitors like OpenAI -- which as of December 2023 raised $100 billion -- its chances of sailing  through privacy and regulatory issues seems more promising. The company is based in France.

Mensch told The Wall Street Journal his model cost less to train -- about €20 million -- which is the equivalent of roughly $22 million in U.S. currency.

No doubt GAI models in time will become less expensive to build, operate and train, bringing the price down for any business that wants to use the technology.

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said last year after the release of GPT-4 that training his company’s biggest models cost between $50 million and $100 million.

Mistral has also partnered with enterprise-software company Salesforce and Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units of GPUs that are used to build AI systems.

Meta's microblogging app Threads is focused on bulking up its app in order to retain its user base and compete with similar apps like X, formerly known as Twitter.

After launching a trending topics list, drafting capabilities and an in-app camera, the platform has announced a bookmarking feature that will allow users to privately save posts for future reference.

“To save a post on Threads, tap the three-dot menu. You'll be able to see the posts you've saved in Settings,” the company posted in a recent thread.

To keep up with the unrelenting proliferation of content on a user's feed, bookmarking posts can help users express interest in long articles, opinion pieces, images and videos they may want to return to at a later date.

Like most of Threads' new features, bookmarking mirrors a popular action on X, where paying subscribers can sort their saved content into organized folders. Meta is focused on appealing to users who are bouncing back and forth between platforms -- and especially those who have decided to fully abandon X for Threads.

Its trending topics list is one of X's most integral features.

However, while the allure of Threads' copycat features may help ex-X users feel more comfortable viewing the app as a worthy substitute, the platform is still committed to setting itself apart.

With the presidential election fast approaching in the U.S., Meta announced that users will not be able to seek out political debate on Threads. This  further distances it from X, which slashed its content-moderation team and is expected to become a hotbed of misinformation and political toxicity.

In addition, Threads is exploring the idea of federation by joining the ActivityPub Protocol, further aligning itself with decentralized X-competitors like Mastodon and Bluesky.

In July, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that the company is committed to building support for ActivityPub but was not able to finish it for launch. “But it's coming,” he added.

The company is also testing a new feature that allows users to share their Threads posts between both Facebook and Instagram, further unifying Meta's family of apps.

Threads' bookmarks feature is rolling out now to its 130 million monthly users.

Instagram is developing a “Friend Map” -- a feature very similar to Snapchat’s Snap Map, which uses a device’s location information to help users locate their friends in real-time on a virtual map visible in the app.

Friend Map was initially spotted by reverse engineer and mobile developer Alessandro Paluzzi, who shared screenshots of the internal prototype on Meta's microblogging platform Threads. According to the images, users can choose who is able to see their location on the live map, with options to share their location with followers who follow them back or people on their “Close Friends” list.

Users would also be able to leave “Notes” –– the short message update feature currently included in users’ direct messaging feeds –– on the map for others to catch up on what's going on in certain locations, effectively tying status updates to specific places.

In addition, Instagram says locations are end-to-end encrypted, while the map features a “Ghost Mode” that allows users to hide their last active location.

By copying another one of Snapchat's core features and integrating it into its own app, Meta is likely attempting to steer more user attention away from competitor apps. In 2016, Meta imitated Snap's Stories feature, building it into one of the company's most popular in-app experiences./p>

Friend Map may also be a result of an ongoing trend of younger consumers choosing to use TikTok and Instagram as their primary search tool when looking for new places to visit, rather than Google Search or Google Maps. The tech giant first took note of this shift in consumer behavior when it launched Instagram's searchable map in late 2022, inviting users to peruse tagged locations in their vicinity.

Meta confirms the feature but says it has not yet been tested externally.

In these trying times of revenue scarcity for digital media there is a growing fear that this might be the end for such entities and perhaps even journalism itself. Will subscriptions be the only way to survive in the future for writers and editors and will Google answer everyone’s search queries with AI produced answers? 

This tired trope is fundamentally wrong on many levels. Consumers turn on a screen for numerous reasons but at their core they all come down to content. That content can be scripted entertainment, it can be insightful commentary, it can be news or great works of fact or fiction, and it can be a funny video of somebody’s kid dancing in their backyard. But it is content…and the human interaction that is inherent with it. 

In one way or another, this has been true since humans first got together in the center of their villages. The technology of how this content was delivered has certainly changed and will continue to morph at ever increasing speeds. And the impact that the technology has on how that content is displayed and consumed will change as well. But at the end of the day we want to be informed, entertained, inspired, and taught. And, we want to be connected to one another. This will not change - it is what has driven the media business in all its iterations to this point and will spur it on into the future. 

Content is indeed king - though there are moments when the king takes a break, usually in the early stages of a major technology shift, like the smartphone. Or in the near future, AI. But even if content takes a break in the next chapter in the story of media, it may not be as dreary as some would have you believe - Google search, AI, and other factors will change the landscape but won’t dethrone the king. 

Google, or search as a whole, will not obliterate connections to content sources by channeling AI-produced content directly on their platform. To do so would destroy their core business model. In many ways this is one of the core reasons Google settled with the Canadian news industry around news content. But in addition to the material financial issues is the even more basic idea that consumers want to know where the answers are coming from. Is this specific take on the news from Fox News or MSNBC? Does this content showcase deep reporting and/or expert analysis from a variety of different sectors or is it simply regurgitated from pieces published several hours to several months ago? At the end of the day, media brands have huge value largely because of the inherent promise that those brands carry. And it is this promise that is core to dealing with the complex issues of our current world. Consumer information needs around topics like the US economy, the war in Eastern Europe or the unfolding misery in the Middle East will require more insight, real reporting, and most of all, a level of trust around the source of this reporting. 

It is clear that search providers would be hard pressed to make full AI answers or AI-generated content the focus of their outcomes. AI is here and will only continue to expand in terms of its power and uses whether in search or beyond. It will be a long time, if ever, that AI generated content will command the same trust as human produced content. 

There are still more issues that arise around this discussion. Our younger generations are getting their news from social platforms. Do readers consume content differently on mobile devices than tablet or desktop? Are there fundamental generational changes afoot? Of course there are but like has happened over the last 200 to 300 years, in the end, humans still want to be connected to one another, be informed, and be entertained. That will never change. 

Without a doubt we are in the ebb cycle of the ebb and flow continuum. But as has been the case in the past, the media business will pivot, will morph, will find new best practices and it will…endure.

Google’s antitrust case against the U.S. Justice Department was unsealed Friday, revealing that Microsoft offered to sell its Bing search engine to Apple in 2018.

In the filing, Google argued that Microsoft pitched Apple many times between 2009 and 2020 about making Bing the default engine in Apple’s Safari web browser, but each time Apple said no. The document cites quality issues with Bing. 

The Justice Department wrote in its own unsealed filing that Microsoft spent nearly $100 billion on Bing over 20 years. Microsoft launched Bing in 2009, as first reported by CNBC.

Microsoft then reached out to Apple in 2018, outlining gains in Bing’s quality. Microsoft wanted to either sell Bing to Apple or build a joint venture based on Bing. 

“Microsoft search quality, their investment in search, everything was not significant at all,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, according to the filing. “And so everything was lower. So the search quality itself wasn’t as good. They weren’t investing at any level comparable to Google or to what Microsoft could invest in. And their advertising organization and how they monetize was not very good either.”

Google in 2021 paid more than $26 billion in exchange for being the default search engine on platforms such as Apple. For Google, Bing, and other search engines, the key is the data. From each query, Google gains a little knowledge from people wanting information, and then it gives a little back, according to the document.  

Some elements of Google’s search engine are trained on 13 months of data, per a court document -- a volume that would take Bing over 17 years to accumulate. 

The document calls out Google's "enormous advantage" given the company's position on mobile devices, providing an insurance policy against future competition.

Google also has loyal followers. When Google increased the prices of text ads by 5% or more, the company remained profitable because of its loyal customers and reach into consumers' pockets. 

Joshua Lowcock, the global chief media officer of Universal McCann, a division of IPG, testified that even if the price of Google’s text ads rose by 5%, the U.S. courts document stated he "would not recommend that clients move advertising spend elsewhere."

During the testimony, Lowcock explained that the primary purpose of advertising is to reach audiences and to reach people at scale.

The more scale a search engine can reach, the more important it is to buy advertising on that platform. Based on market share, there is a limit to the amount of specific keywords an advertisers can buy on Bing.

Federal and state prosecutors failed to prove that Google violated antitrust laws by arranging to serve as the default search engine on browsers developed by Apple and Mozilla, and on Android mobile devices, the company contends in new court papers.

“Punishing a successful firm that has out-innovated its competitors to the benefit of consumers harms competition, not the other way around,” the company argued in a 123-page post-trial brief filed with U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C. The brief, filed under seal earlier this month, was made available on Friday, but with some passages blacked out.

“When Google has succeeded in the competition to be the default in a particular browser, it has done so by offering the best product at the best price,” Google adds.

Mehta presided over a trial last year in which prosecutors from the U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of states attempted to prove that Google violated anti-monopoly laws.

One of the antitrust enforcers' major contentions in the case was that Google obtained dominance in search by contracting to be the default search engine in Mozilla's Firefox browser and Apple's Safari browser, and to have its search engine pre-installed on Android smartphones.

Prosecutors reiterated that argument in their post-trial brief, also made available Friday.

“Google pays billions of dollars to guarantee it is the exclusive out-of-the-box default search engine across nearly all search access points -- particularly on mobile phones,” the prosecutors argue in their 108-page filing. “Google therefore denies rivals access to the most important distribution channels for general search engines.... Without access to those distribution channels, rivals cannot achieve the scale necessary to compete effectively with Google.”

Prosecutors also argued that Google's payments to Apple “incentivize Apple to not enter the relevant markets.”

The prosecutors cited testimony from Apple's Eduardo Cue, who negotiated the search deal with Google, that Apple would have developed its own search engine if Google hadn't paid the company for default status in Safari.

Google argues its deals with Apple and Mozilla reflect the quality of Google's search engine.

“The evidence at trial demonstrated that Microsoft has for many years pitched Apple to make Bing the default search engine instead of Google for the Safari browser,” Google writes.

“In each instance, Apple took a hard look at the relative quality of Bing versus Google and concluded that Google was the superior default choice for its Safari users. That is competition,” the company adds.

Google also notes that Mozilla, which began using Google as the default search for the Firefox browser in 2004, changed the default to Yahoo from 2014, but reverted to Google in 2017.

“During the years Yahoo was the default search engine, Mozilla observed a decline in both (1) usage of the default search functionality in Firefox and (2) the number of users of the Firefox browser,” Google writes.

“Mozilla’s preference for Google as the default search engine and its view about the importance of having competition among search providers for the Firefox default could not be more clear,” Google argues. “Mozilla advised the Department of Justice, in a letter sent weeks before this lawsuit was filed, that it would be significantly harmed in its ability to compete were it not permitted to enter into a default search agreement with Google, because Google provides the best user experience and is preferred by Firefox users.”