[ad_1]
Facebook deliberately concealed for over a year the problem of exaggerated average surveillance times for paid video ads, a group of digital marketers said Tuesday.
In September 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook had miscalculated the average time spent by users viewing paid video ads by 60 to 80%. At the time, Facebook had stated that the problem had existed for about a month and that it had been resolved.
But a group of marketers, who in 2016 filed a class action suit against Facebook for the wrong measures, said Tuesday that Facebook had been aware of the problem for well over a month and had not done anything about it. for more than a year. In the amended hearing record that Adweek reviewed, the complainants cited internal communications to Facebook that indicate that by July 2015, Facebook's engineers knew why this miscalculation had occurred.
The complainants claimed that some pay video advertising statistics had been inflated by 150 to 900%, more than previously reported.
Facebook used a "no public relations" strategy to avoid drawing attention to the problem and "concealing the fact that we ruined everything," the plaintiffs alleged, citing internal communications. Advertisers stated that the new information encouraged them to add an allegation of fraud to their original complaint.
In a statement, a Facebook spokesman denied the new allegations.
"This lawsuit is unfounded and we have filed a motion to dismiss these fraud charges," said the spokesman. "The suggestions that we tried to hide this problem from our partners are false. We reported the error to our customers when we discovered it – and updated our help center to explain the problem. "
When asked about the communications cited in the complaint, the company stated that the complainants "misread" the documents, took them "out of context" and chose "cherry" the quotes.
The complainants had access to 80,000 internal Facebook documents as a result of the ongoing litigation arising from the 2016 complaint. The internal documents formed the basis of the updated application, which included allegations of fraud. Facebook is firstly beaten to prevent the publication of documents. The plaintiffs insisted that the information be unsealed, and the professional association of publishers, Digital Content Next, informed Facebook that it was considering filing an amicus brief on behalf of the industry. 39; digital edition so that the court record is unsealed, said DCN General Manager Jason Kint.
The costume was purchased by marketers who ran video ads on the platform. Among them are the social media marketing agency LLE One, which operates under the names of Crowd Siren and social media models, and a man from Pennsylvania who bought advertising on the platform. They claim to have purchased video advertising services from Facebook based on inflated viewer statistics that led them to buy more advertising and pay a higher price than if they had been aware of the statistics.
They seek redress for third parties who have paid for investments while the wrong measures were in place and claim punitive damages, as well as the obligation for Facebook to allow third-party auditors to assess its advertising settings.
Applicants are not alone in wanting more third-party verification options. A number of industry leaders, including the Omnicom News Agency and Unilever Marketing Director Keith Weed, have called Facebook to authorize external measures.
Since the video ad statistics scandal of 2016, Facebook has changed the way it measures the performance of video ads on the platform and other advertising indicators. Earlier this year, the company had been accredited by the Media Rating Council to provide certain metrics to marketers, and had established measurement verification partners.
Kint, whose organization represents digital media publishers, said Wednesday that new information from court records is shedding light on how Facebook works when its business partners face problems.
"There are significant issues of trust about how a company and its leaders act when they make a mistake, but when the industry and the public do not know it yet, and I think Facebook fails on this, depending on what I am. reading, "said Kint." There are also significant issues of trust in the behavior of a company after being called for something, and I think they are failing here too.
Source link
