Google Extends its Ad-Serving Protections to Include Under 18s

YouTube is one of the top places to reach teens at scale. In fact, it’s ingrained in their day-to-day lives, with 77% of teens watching videos on YouTube every day.¹ Watching online videos is the favorite media activity with teens, regardless of gender, income level, and racial or ethnic group.

On August 15th 2022, Google extended its ad-serving protections to include teens. As a result of this decision, ad personalization (for under 18s) is disabled, meaning that ad targeting based on age, gender, or interests of users under 18 is blocked. Additionally, as location history is turned off, geo-targeting is limited for users under 18.

This change means that brands will no longer be able to buy Google ads based on teens’ behavioral data or Google profiles. Instead, brands should consider partnering with a specialist in granular demographic and interest-based contextual teen segments to ensure that no cookie-based behavioral targeting or user profiling takes place. This means that ads are only placed based on the content of channels, rather than the behavior or personal data of users. Brands should also place less of an emphasis on keyword targeting. In a recent test, only 40% of YouTube impressions delivered were relevant to the keywords provided.² 

Here’s where SuperAwesome can help. Our AwesomeAds for Social solution is a contextual database of over 45,000 channels, all selectable based on their audience appeal and categorized by gender, age, language, and genre. This enables safe, effective, and accurate engagement with younger audiences. AwesomeAds for Social also manually confirms that each channel upholds our standards for youth and brand safety through a dedicated team of human moderators. 

Additionally, our ad platform and ad serving technology, AwesomeAds, is built on the principles of protecting audiences up to 20 years old by safely reaching them everywhere they engage on mobile, web, streaming TV, and YouTube without the use of cookie-based behavioral targeting or user profiling. Our technology is designed with COPPA and GDPR-K in mind and is served on a contextual basis only. 

With these new changes, AwesomeAds for Social can help you effectively reach your teen audience on YouTube. Contact us to learn more about how SuperAwesome can help your brand reach teens safely.

¹ Common Sense Media, 2021

² SuperAwesome Internal Test, August 2022