Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thank you, Mr. Air, a netizen of CTOnews.com, for your clue delivery! According to the news on June 9, many advertising buyers said that Google and Microsoft, owned by Alphabet, have inserted ads in the process of experimenting with artificial intelligence in their own search engines and have no option to exit or close them. This practice has angered some brands and is likely to be resisted by the advertising industry.

Because artificial intelligence can automatically generate responses to open query questions raised by users, Google and Microsoft are competing to use artificial intelligence technology to transform their own search engines. This process will subvert the way advertisers reach consumers through search results ads. MAGNA, a research firm, estimates that the search advertising market will grow by 10% this year to $286 billion (currently about 2.04 trillion yuan).

In February, Microsoft began releasing artificial intelligence chat robot features to Bing users. Microsoft said it was testing inserting ads into the artificial intelligence chat robot of Bing search engine to transfer some traditional search ads to artificial intelligence-generated responses.

In an interview in May, Google Advertising General Manager Jerry Dischler said the technology company would also use existing search ads to experiment with how to place ads in artificial intelligence search snapshots, an early test feature called search Generation experience (Search Generative Experience), which was first launched last month. Google said ad buyers could not choose to withdraw from the test at this time.

Both companies say they are in the early stages of testing generative artificial intelligence advertising and are actively working with advertisers to solicit their feedback.

Advertisers say some advertisers are cautious about spending marketing budgets on features that are only used by a small number of users. Advertisers usually want to control the specific location of display ads and are worried that their own brand ads will appear next to inappropriate or undesirable content.

Microsoft and Google say existing safeguards in their search engines allow users to prevent ads from appearing in the list of relevant search results by setting keywords. This function is also available in artificial intelligence search engines.

The two companies have invested tens of billions of dollars in generative artificial intelligence, including investments in other artificial intelligence companies. Microsoft, for example, has invested billions of dollars in ChatGPT developer OpenAI, while Google has invested $400 million in OpenAI competitor Anthropic. So it's important that they get real income from this technology.

Media organization Horizon Media has worked with brands such as insurance company GEICO and Corona Beer. Jason Lee, the company's executive vice president for brand security, said it was a common concern among advertisers to test new forms of advertising without the brand's consent. Another advertising buyer for a large advertising company also said that the advertising industry would not generally accept this practice.

In response, a number of major advertisers chose not to co-operate with Microsoft for the time being, according to a buyer familiar with the matter. Wells Fargo continues to allocate part of its advertising budget to channels other than Microsoft, the person familiar with the matter said.

In an interview, Lynne Kjolso, Microsoft's vice president of global partnerships and retail media, said the company's goal is to introduce new forms of Bing search advertising as seamlessly as possible without increasing the workload of advertisers.

Microsoft recently launched hotel ads in Bing chat robots and is working to introduce ads in other industries such as real estate, she said.

Technology platform provides more and more artificial intelligence solutions. Although these programs can bring better results for advertisers, they need to give up their control over advertising to a certain extent. The resulting concerns have heightened tensions between advertisers and technology platforms.

"this is not the first time Google and Bing have limited the control of advertisers while expanding their networks," said Samantha Aiken, head of paid search at marketing agency Code3.

Aiken cites Google's Performance Max, a tool that uses artificial intelligence to automatically find the best location for ads in multiple Google products, eliminating the need for advertisers to set how to place them. She said that many people in the industry believe that Google Performance Max is a "black box" because the algorithm model does not say how it decides where to place ads.

Three ad buyers said they were concerned that Microsoft also lacked transparency reports and would not say which search keywords would trigger specific brands of ads to appear in the results of generative artificial intelligence response. or how these ads compare to traditional search ads.

Two ad buyers said that while Microsoft representatives acknowledged that customers would have such concerns, they did not say when more transparency reports would be provided.

"advertisers can't get the report directly to find out how often ads appear in Bing chatbots," said one advertising buyer. "

Mr Kjorso said transparency reporting had always been a top priority for advertising agencies and that Microsoft's product team was "giving priority to this issue".

"We are considering what additional features and controls need to be provided to advertisers," she said. " She added that the sales team was actively working with some brands to allay their doubts about the location of the ads. Two ad buyers from large advertising companies say it is a big question how search engines prevent ads from appearing next to artificial intelligence responses that contain false information.

Kjorso explained that Bing's vast amount of online information can be used as a cover for large language models and can actually reduce the risk of generating false information.

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