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Meta’s YouTube campaign was designed to attract young users to Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg made a dramatic appearance before the U.S. Congress in JanuaryA Facebook co-founder has apologized to the families of child victims who were sexually exploited and abused on its platform.
As the world’s two largest online advertising platforms, the two Silicon Valley-based companies are usually fierce rivals. Late last year, Google began taking actions in an effort to boost ad revenue, while Meta has struggled to capture the attention of young users amid a battle with fast-growing rivals such as TikTok.
Last week, Zuckerberg told investors that recent efforts to attract more 18- to 29-year-olds have paid off.
The two companies worked with Spark Foundry, the US subsidiary of French advertising giant Publicis Groupe, to launch a pilot marketing program in Canada between February and April this year, according to people and documents seen by the Financial Times.
Due to the significant effect, the application began to be tested in the United States in May. People familiar with the matter said that the two companies plan to further promote it to international markets and promote other Meta applications such as Facebook.
While the pilot is small, Google sees it as an opportunity to build a more lucrative “omnichannel” partnership with Meta, which would involve more visible and expensive “branded” ads on YouTube and its other platforms.
Google has launched an investigation into the allegations, the Financial Times reported, and a person familiar with the matter said the project has now been cancelled.
Google said: “We prohibit personalized ads to people under 18, period. These policies go far beyond what is required and are supported by technical safeguards. We have confirmed that these safeguards worked here” because the company did not directly target any registered YouTube users known to be under 18.
No loopholes to deny
However, Google did not deny that the “unknown” loophole had been exploited, adding: “We will also take additional steps to emphasize to sales representatives that they must not help advertisers or agencies run campaigns that attempt to circumvent our policies.”
Meta said it does not believe selecting the “unknown” audience constitutes personalization or circumventing any rules, adding that it adheres to its own policies as well as those of its peers when advertising its services. The company did not respond to questions about whether employees were aware that the “unknown” group skewed toward younger users.
“We have always openly marketed our apps to young people, providing them with a place to connect with friends, find community and discover interests,” Meta said.
Spark Foundry has not yet responded to multiple requests for comment.
Last week, the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill that Children’s Online Safety Act The KOSA Act, which would require social media platforms to take a duty of care to protect children from harmful online content, is a rare bipartisan agreement that brings the U.S. closer to major legislation targeting child safety in Silicon Valley.
“Big tech companies cannot be trusted to protect our children,” Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn told the Financial Times about Google’s partnership with Meta. She urged Congress to pass the Kosa Act. “Once again, they have been caught exploiting our children, and these Silicon Valley executives have proven that they will always put profits over our children.”
“Meta is losing young people, and they’ve found a backdoor,” said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, which advocates for children’s privacy.
Meta’s policies regarding minors have long been under scrutiny.
The company was sued by 33 states, alleging it engaged in “manipulative” behavior toward young users, which it denies.
Meanwhile, the FTC is also trying to ban Meta from making money from teenage viewers as part of an update to its existing privacy agreement, which Meta is challenging in court.
In 2021, Facebook shelved plans to launch a kids version of Instagram after public backlash and whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked Facebook executives’ own research that found the app was damaging to teenage girls’ mental health.
How an unlikely partnership developed
The Meta-Google project originated in early 2023, when Spark Foundry, acting on behalf of Instagram’s parent company, asked a range of partners to run a “Meta IG Connects” ad campaign, according to documents and multiple people familiar with the matter.
Internal documents show that Spark worked on behalf of Meta’s marketing data science team and was responsible for attracting more “Generation Z” customers to download Instagram, which had been losing users to rival apps, particularly TikTok.
For years, Instagram has worried about losing its “teen foothold.” According to a 2021 report in The New York Times, the company had previously devoted its entire marketing budget to targeting teenagers, especially the “high school” group of 13 to 15 years old.
In an email seen by the Financial Times, a Spark Foundry advertising manager asked Google to promote the campaign, specifying that the “primary” target was “13 to 17 year olds” and asking for it to be measured through data collected directly from viewers. The secondary target was 18 to 24 year olds.
In 2021, Google introduced what it said were stricter protections for teenagers on its website. “We will block ads based on the age, gender, or interests of people under 18,” the company said.
Google’s “Youth Advertising Protection” policy adds: “We expect all advertisers to comply with local legal requirements when using our products… and all Google advertising policies.”
But Google employees came up with a workaround to circumvent the policy: a group called “Unknown,” according to people familiar with the matter.
Google says on its website that the “unknown” group “refers to people whose age, gender, parental status or household income we haven’t yet determined.”
But the internet team’s staff has thousands of data points, from users’ locations via cell towers to their app downloads and online activity, giving them confidence that the “unknown” group includes many younger users, particularly those under 18.
After shutting down programming for other age groups for which they had demographic data, that left only an unknown age group that had a high percentage of minors and children: This was described as a way to “hack” the viewer protections in its system, one of the people said.
In response to questions about using the tactic to circumvent its policies, Google said: “Ads targeting the ‘unknown’ category can reach a wide variety of audiences,” including those who have turned off ad personalization.
Meta said: “Google’s ‘Unknown’ targeting option applies to all advertisers – not just Meta – and we have clear principles around how our apps can be marketed to teens through other platforms.”
As part of the pitch, Spark sent another email in late 2023 asking Google to provide Meta with “platform-specific data and teen behavioral insights.” This would “enable us to tailor and improve our media strategy, messaging, and creative execution,” the email said.
As part of its pitch, Google also boasted about its “truly impressive” usage among 13- to 17-year-olds, easily surpassing daily usage on TikTok and Instagram, the documents show.
Google won the mandate from Spark Foundry, and both teams took precautions against directly mentioning age ranges in writing, according to a person familiar with the matter. Employees used euphemisms in presentations, such as a slide that simply said “embrace the unknown,” according to documents reviewed by the Financial Times.
“It shows you how both of these companies remain untrustworthy, disingenuous, powerful platforms that need serious regulation and oversight,” said Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy, referring to Meta’s partnership with Alphabet’s Google.
Contributors: Stephen Morris, Hannah Murphy and Hannah McCarthy in San Francisco
© Financial Times
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