Platform Prater: How does one get good PR for organizations that work mostly in the dark? For the FBI or the CIA, where transparency is difficult and often illegal, it’s tough to be specific about disasters they prevented. So it was refreshing to see a Google exec, director of sustainable ads Scott Spencer, offer an inside look at how Google blocks bad ads and fake content. “In 2017, we took down more than 3.2 billion ads that violated our advertising policies,” he wrote in a March 14 post. That’s a bit more than 100 bad ads per second. “This means we’re able to block the majority of bad ad experiences, like malvertising and phishing scams, before the scams impact people.” More statistics: Google blocked 79 million ads “for attempting to send people to malware-laden sites, and removed 400,000 of these unsafe sites last year…[it] removed 66 million “trick-to-click” ads as well as 48 million ads that were attempting to get users to install unwanted software.” Google, he writes, removed 320,000 publishers from its ad network for violating policies and blacklisted nearly 90,000 websites and 700,000 mobile apps. Google removed 2 million pages for policy violations each month. After expanding a policy against “dangerous and derogatory” content in April 2017, it removed ads from 8,700 pages. Fake news is also on the radar. Google reviewed 11,000 websites for content scamming and blocked more than 650 and terminated 90 publishers from its network. A frequent violation, Google says, is scraping content. Scraping occurs “when bad actors try to make money” quickly by copying news or content from other sites.” Google blocked more than 12,000 websites for scraping in ’17. Another scam is using an ad that looks like a sensational headline, such as “Ellen DeGeneres adopts a baby elephant!” to sell diet pills. Google suspended more than 7,000 AdWords accounts for tabloid cloaking violations, up from 1,400 in 2016. So the Internet isn’t quite the lawless Wild West we thought it was. Google and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook likely will need to exhibit more such transparency as they deal with government regulators and Facebook’s links to alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Cambridge Analytica affair. At press time March 19, Facebook shares were down 7% and its market value was reduced $37 billion on reports of Cambridge Analytica’s obtaining profile information of Facebook users. - In a slap at Amazon, Google unveiled Shopping Actions, billing it as a way for retailers to drive “better transactions”(read: transactions that don’t end in a purchase on Amazon). Shopping Actions lets retailers list products on Google Search, Google Express shopping and Google Assistant on mobile phones and voice devices, Reuters reports. In exchange, retailers pay Google a piece of each product purchased. Searches on mobile for “where can I buy x product?” are up 85% during the past two years, Google says.
Wells Fargo
News Bits: Considering the amount of coverage this and other publications devoted to medtech startup Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes, the denouement seems anticlimactic. After allegedly hoodwinking investors, doctors, patients and brands such as Walgreens about a blood-testing machine that miraculously promised to conduct a multitude of tests on a tiny sample at a fraction of the cost of standard testers—and refusing to answer media questions about it—the Theranos machine eventually was shown to be bogus. Last week the SEC charged Holmes and former Theranos president Ramesh Balwani with fraud. Just two days later, March 16, Holmes agreed to pay a fine of $500K, surrender most of her Theranos stake and not run a public company for 10 years. No prison time for Holmes, who deceived so many people—including doctors and patients—seems like a slap on the wrist. – Whom to believe? The Wall St Journal reported March 16 FBI agents interviewed some of the 14,500 wealth management employees at crisis-riddled Wells Fargo. At our press time yesterday, Wells Fargo denied any employee was interviewed. The Journal stood by its reporting. The Justice Department earlier this month ordered Wells Fargo to look into irregularities in its wealth management unit. – In spite of Wells Fargo’s issues and poor performance in 2017, CEO Tim Sloan is set to receive a 35% pay raise ($17.5 million). Some shareholders are contemplating blocking the pay hike, the New York Post reports. -- Golin launched Have Her Back, a movement to commit to gender parity in creative leadership. Have Her Back is grounded in hiring, training and creating cultures of empowerment, Golin said. Golin committed to doubling the percentage of women on its ideator track working toward executive creative director roles yearly through 2020.
People:Veteran tech commmunicator Ryan Donovanjoined Ruder Finn as EVP/MD of its SF office. His resume includes senior positions at HP, Sitecore and SanDisk. – Mark Crumpacker is out as Chipotle’s CMO. The move coincides with the departure of high school chum/Chiptole founder Steve Ells as CEO. The new CEO is former Taco Bell chief Brian Niccol; Ells remains chairman.