by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, March 17, 2017

Google on Friday said it will change its advertising policies following a move by brands and the U.K. government, which began pulling ads after brand content was repeatedly placed alongside inappropriate content promoting offensive behavior.

Ronan Harris, managing director of Google U.K., wrote in a blog post that the company recognizes the need to have strict policies that define where Google ads should appear.

Google supports millions of sites in its network and some 400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. “We recognize that we don’t always get it right,” Harris wrote.

The admission of guilt also accompanied a course correction that Google is taking to create a safer environment for brands.

“We’ve begun a thorough review of our ads policies and brand controls, and we will be making changes in the coming weeks to give brands more control over where their ads appear across YouTube and the Google Display Network,” Harris wrote.

This week, the British government, retailers and The Guardian began pulling ads from Google and YouTube, saying the mishap was unacceptable.

The decision to pull the ads occurred after The Times of London found ads from many large companies and the U.K. government were serving up alongside hate speech and extremist content.

In Google’s 2016 bad ads report, the company claimed that it had removed 1.7 billion bad ads from its results that violated its advertising policies.

In this latest blog post from Harris, the company admitted that it removed more than 100,000 publishers from its AdSense program and prevented ads from serving on more than 300 million YouTube videos.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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