By Emily Glazer and Patience Haggin
Google set up a searchable database of political ads last
summer, following calls for greater transparency in the wake of
Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Nearly a year later, the search giant's archive of political ads
is fraught with errors and delays, according to campaigns' digital
staffers and political consultants. The database, the Google
Transparency Report, doesn't always record political ads bought
with Google's ad tools and in some instances hasn't updated for
weeks at a time, they say.
Several campaigns, including those of Democratic presidential
hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have run ads in
recent weeks that didn't appear in the Google archive, people
familiar with the campaigns' ad-buying said. Such mistakes have
occurred for presidential and congressional candidates in both
parties.
A Google spokeswoman said in a statement, "We are constantly
working to improve the report and appreciate feedback on how we can
make it better."
Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., is a powerhouse in sales of
digital political advertising. Mistakes and glitches in its archive
could give more fuel to the company's critics at a time when it and
other tech giants are under scrutiny in Washington over their
market power, privacy lapses and difficulties tracking content on
their platforms.
Omissions in the database also raise the prospect, political
digital consultants and election watchdogs say, that Google could
be missing ads run by parties looking to influence the coming
election by boosting or disparaging certain candidates, as Russian
entities were found to have done.
"If even the political advertisers that expect to be included in
the archive are not seeing their ads made publicly available, how
much is escaping disclosure by actors who want to stay secret?"
said Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at the nonpartisan
Campaign Legal Center.
The extent of the discrepancies couldn't be fully determined.
Google's database has logged more than 115,000 ads.
For the political campaigns, including a crowded field of 2020
presidential hopefuls, database inaccuracies are making it harder
to track rivals at a time when digital advertising is central for
campaigns looking to target voters more economically than through
television advertising.
Spending on political digital advertising is projected to hit
$3.3 billion in 2020, up from $1.4 billion in 2016, according to
Borrell Associates Inc. That compares with a projected $4.7 billion
in political spending on broadcast TV in 2020, up from $4.4 billion
in 2016.
Facebook Inc. launched its own advertising archive in mid-2018,
and it reports ads designated as political in the Facebook Ad
Library Report. Both it and Google vowed to be more transparent
after acknowledging that Russian entities had purchased
election-focused ads on their platforms.
Google's transparency report tracks ads that promote current
federal officeholders as well as candidates for Congress, the vice
presidency and the presidency, according to its website. Ad buyers
are expected to mark their ads as political by entering their
organization's Federal Election Commission ID or tax ID when they
make the purchase.
Google archives political ads purchased through its two
ad-buying tools: Google Ads, and Display & Video 360.
Candidates can use rival buying tools to purchase digital ads that
will go through Google's marketplaces and appear on sites around
the web, but they won't end up in the Google archive. The Warren
and Sanders ads were purchased using Google tools, the people
familiar with their ad-buying said.
Google says it has systems to detect political ads from buyers
who don't classify them properly by adding the federal election or
tax ID, and declined to provide more details. "We don't go publicly
into our enforcement processes and how it works. But we review all
ads for compliance with all our policies," a spokesman said.
Some in the industry said that while Google's archive is
imperfect, it is still a formidable resource. "They're doing a
remarkable job at capturing a lot of what's happening -- and
there's always room for improvement," said Mark Jablonowski,
managing partner at DS Political, a political digital-ad firm.
Google's archive tracks ads by candidate but not by political
issue, such as illegal immigration or gun control -- a point of
frustration for advocates of stricter disclosure laws, since some
ads bought by Russia-affiliated entities in 2016 were
issue-focused. The Google spokeswoman said the company is looking
to expand coverage to issues advertising.
Facebook, on the other hand, faced criticism not for missing
political ads, but for casting its net too wide. News publishers
complained on some occasions that Facebook flagged paid posts
promoting news articles as political ads. It eventually exempted
news articles from its political ad archive.
More than a dozen Democratic and Republican strategists,
including some working on presidential campaigns, said they first
noticed problems with Google's ad archive system in the 2018
midterm campaigns and have seen them continue into the 2020
season.
In the current cycle, President Trump and 23 Democratic
presidential candidates have spent about $12.7 million so far on
digital ads from Google, including $5.1 million by Mr. Trump alone,
according to data compiled by Acronym, a left-leaning nonprofit
that tracks digital spending.
In the 2018 midterm election season, Google attracted about 10%
of the total $623 million spent on digital advertising, according
to estimates by Tech for Campaigns, a technology nonprofit geared
toward left-leaning and centrist campaigns.
In her unsuccessful 2018 bid for the House, Texas Democratic
candidate MJ Hegar spent more than $100,000 on digital ads through
Google -- yet less than half of that spending was reflected in
Google's ad archive, according to Ryan Irvin, president of Change
Media Group, which purchased ads for the campaign.
Ms. Hegar's campaign spent thousands of dollars to promote a
3-minute-28-second campaign video as an ad on Google's YouTube in
September 2018, according to a person familiar with the matter.
This advertising didn't appear in Google's archive as of July
15.
Ms. Hegar is running for a Senate seat in 2020, and Google's ad
archive has additional discrepancies in tracking her spending.
According to data in the archive, "MJ for Texas" bought ads in June
2019 to promote another Texas candidate's House campaign, Kim Olson
for Congress.
A person familiar with the matter said Ms. Hegar's campaign
hasn't purchased ads promoting Ms. Olson's campaign.
A Google spokeswoman, referring to the missing Hegar ads, said
in a statement, "Due to a mistake on our end, not all the ads from
this advertiser were displayed in the report. We have identified
the missing ads and they will be included in the report in the next
update." Referring to the Olson ads incorrectly attributed to
Hegar, the Google spokeswoman said Google was looking into the
issue.
A political consultant who worked on a campaign for a Midwestern
congressional candidate during the 2018 cycle said thousands of
dollars of online display ads for the candidate didn't show up in
Google's archive.
Quartz, a news website, also recently reported that ads run by
Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke's campaign didn't
show up in Google's ad archive. The Google spokeswoman said that
there was an "error in our enforcement process."
The Google spokeswoman said it updates its transparency report
weekly, though updates have occasionally taken longer. There were
at least two separate weekslong instances this past winter and
spring when Google's ad archive didn't update at all, political
consultants said.
The archive can be searched by format, including video, image
and text. Ads are sometimes categorized improperly, with a video ad
showing up in the text category, for example. Google is looking
into this issue, the spokeswoman said.
In other cases, the archive lists a candidate's ad but doesn't
show the content, as it did this spring with ads for Mr. Trump, Mr.
O'Rourke and Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.), who also is running
for president.
In addition to the archive, Google has had other hiccups in its
political ad operation. The company has a policy against showing
political ads in Gmail, but ads for Ms. Harris and Sen. Cory Booker
(D., N.J.), another presidential candidate, have appeared there,
according to a person familiar with the matter and a screenshot
reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
"I think it's a fair question whether Google has a handle on how
ads are showing up on its page and not in its archives," said
Katherine Haenschen, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech who
has studied the tech platforms' resistance to regulation of digital
advertising. If tech giants like Google "don't have a sufficient
handle on their own technology, why should they be allowed to
regulate themselves?"
Write to Emily Glazer at emily.glazer@wsj.com and Patience
Haggin at patience.haggin@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 17, 2019 05:44 ET (09:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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