Google's Ad Tech Rivals Seize Opportunity After YouTube Boycott

Weeks after scores of advertisers boycotted YouTube, Google is still trying to mitigate the damage. Meanwhile, long-struggling competitors in the digital ad market are seizing the moment, according to Bloomberg.

Google has tried to silence the shouting. After the first wave of advertiser defections, they introduced new controls to address the problem. When more advertisers left, Google added even more features and shifted resources into new technology that flags offensive videos and disable ads on them.

Most analysts believe the YouTube boycott will have minimal impact on Google sales. Its draw is too large to keep advertisers away permanently, and the boycott has not stopped search ads, Google's bedrock. Yet some marketing agencies and advertisers are reevaluating buying plans, cognizant of the harm poor ad placement can cause. That adds pressure on Google.

NBC Universal announced a deal with mobile ad company Kargo to place ads on 300 premium digital properties from 70 media companies. Convincing advertisers to pay up for premium content was a feat, given the discounts and wide distribution that giants like Google offer, said Kargo CEO Harry Kargman. The YouTube boycott was a gif for them.

MediaMath, too, views its new service as responding to a market shift. The YouTube crisis wasn't just a backlash against Google, it was a protest against the pitfalls of automated advertising in general, the systems and services that let marketers accurately target consumers but also sprinkle ads everywhere across the web. MediaMath said its new service will limit that sprinkling, sending ads to websites and online videos that it constantly monitors for quality.

It's likely that shifts in digital spending away from Google, if any, would not appear until later in the year. However, some ad companies said they were seeing efforts to realign spending now to avoid the YouTube fracas. Charles Gabriel, president of Apester, which makes interactive software for publishers, said that over the past two weeks marketers began requesting safety controls on all online videos where they run ads.

Google executives have argued that, given YouTube's size, brand safety guarantees for every single video are impossible. But they've reassured marketers the issue will subside.  Tara Walpert Levy, Google's vice president of agency and media solutions, told the audience at the Los Angeles conference that many advertisers that left over the issue have returned. But only Johnson & Johnson has said so publicly.