Google Performance Max: The Future of Advertising, Power and AI

  • Workshop
  • Board Room
  • Thursday 21.05 — 11:50 - 13:05

Organising Institution

Check My Ads

International

The mission of Check My Ads is to reboot the business model of the internet. We bring transparency and accountability to the notoriously opaque and purposefully complex digital advertising ecosystem. The global advertising industry is projected to be worth $1 trillion USD and is among the world’s largest unregulated industries.
Google’s Performance Max (PMax) is an artificial intelligence (AI) media buying product that Google relies on for optimisation for advertising campaigns in its Google Ads advertising platform. As Google pushes advertisers to use this AI product, instead of traditional manual curation for ad placement, it is becoming increasingly important in online advertising. Check My Ads has conducted test campaigns using PMax to better understand the effects on advertisers, end-users, and within the digital advertising ecosystem. This workshop is designed to show the main findings of these campaigns, highlighting some of the tensions of Google PMax with personal data protection, consumer protection, online safety, and competition law, and seeks feedback from the CPDP community to the best policy solutions for addressing potential harms.

Host

Iesha White

Check My Ads - International

Iesha White is Director of Intelligence at Check My Ads, where she leads research and industry initiatives that promote transparency and accountability in advertising. She brings over a decade of experience in programmatic advertising at companies like Tinuiti, Sony Pictures, Xaxis, and Cardlytics.

Host

Lex Zard

Check My Ads - International

Aleksandre Zardiashvili (Lex Zard) is Policy Director of Check My Ads and a legal scholar specialising in EU digital policy and online advertising. He earned his PhD at Leiden University and is the 2024-2025 Technology and Human Rights Fellow at Harvard Carr Centre of Human Rights Policy.