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European regulators have asked Google to provide more information about a secret advertising partnership with Meta which skirted the search company’s own rules on how minors should be treated online, raising the prospect of a formal investigation into the tech giant.
Officials from the European Commission have been looking into a series of ad campaigns promoting Instagram to teenagers on YouTube.
In October, commission regulators ordered lawyers for Alphabet, Google’s parent company, to review and collate data, presentations, internal chats and emails related to the ad campaigns, according to people familiar with the matter.
This material was gathered in Google’s internal probe into the incident, codenamed “Tangerine Owl”. This information was presented to Brussels officials who are deciding whether to act, the people said.
The commission declined to comment.
During the ad campaign, first revealed in an FT investigation published in August, staff at Google were helping Meta bypass the search company’s policies on how online advertising can be directed to minors.
While Google bans ad personalisation for teens, the campaign for Instagram on YouTube deliberately pushed messages to a group of users labelled as “unknown” in its system. Google employees told Meta that it had internal data that showed this group skewed towards under-18s and was a way of “hacking” the audience safeguards in their system.
Using this information, Spark Foundry, a subsidiary of French advertising giant Publicis, launched a successful pilot marketing programme in Canada. The campaign was then expanded to the US earlier this year, with plans to roll it out worldwide and to other Meta apps including Facebook. However, after the FT report the project was cancelled.
Google has since held virtual town halls for advertising staff, reasserting company policies and requiring them to affirm they understand and accept their responsibilities, the people said. It has also banned any demographic-based targeting of the “unknown” group exclusively, with the youngest age option being 18- to 24-year-olds.
“The safeguards we have to protect teens, like prohibiting ad personalisation, are industry-leading and continue to work,” said Google in a statement. “We’ve held updated internal trainings to ensure our sales teams remain aware of our policies and technical protections”.
Google has also become more cautious about doing business with Meta, in particular working on any campaigns aimed at promoting social media apps to younger users. A quarterly business review scheduled with its Big Tech rival and Spark Foundry was abruptly cancelled in the late summer as the company investigated the FT report, the people said.
However, Meta is such a large advertiser — and Google so dominant in online advertising — that the pair are still working on multiple campaigns for Instagram and Facebook on various platforms including YouTube.
Both companies are facing escalating pressure from politicians and regulators. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was summoned before US Congress in January, where he apologised to the families of children who had been victims of sexual exploitation and abuse on his platforms.
Google has recently lost two major antitrust cases brought against its app store and search business. The US Department of Justice has asked a judge to force Alphabet to sell its Chrome web browser and share more user search and advertising data to break down its illegal monopoly in those areas.
Last month, a court in Virginia heard closing arguments in a third antitrust case against Alphabet’s digital advertising business, the automated marketplace that buys, sells and places video and picture adverts online. The judge presiding has said she aims to make a ruling by the end of the year.
