YouTube will no longer accept advertising on its masthead space for alcoholic beverages, gambling, prescription drugs, and political ads.
The new policy will prohibit any ads that promote the sale of alcohol, or display the branding of alcoholic beverages even if the ad does not explicitly reference sales, as originally reported by Axios.
Masthead ads are the most prominent Google advertising placement available to advertisers, according to Google’s YouTube masthead content requirements, which clarifies that “content requirements may be more restrictive than the ad requirements for other platforms and surfaces, meaning disapproved YouTube masthead ad assets may continue to run on Google’s other owned and operated properties.”
Last November, YouTube stopped advertisers from buying full-day masthead space after backlash following then-President Donald Trump’s election team purchasing the space for Election Day. Instead, the space now contains targeted ads bought on a per-impression basis, according to CNBC.
“We regularly review our advertising requirements to ensure they balance the needs of both advertisers and users,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We believe this update will build on changes we made last year to the masthead reservation process and will lead to a better experience for users.”
Although alcohol ads are allowed on other portions of the site — such as before and during videos — YouTube introduced an option at the end of last year allowing users to turn off ads for alcohol and gambling in their personal ad control settings.
The latest move by YouTube is likely a safety measure for the platform and for advertisers to make sure that consumers seeing beer and alcohol advertisements are of legal drinking age, according to a source familiar with alcoholic beverage advertising.
Equating the YouTube masthead to a billboard, the source said the move won’t necessarily have a large impact on beer advertisers, as companies are prioritizing individually targeted ads, and said “you can do a whole lot more [with] targeted advertising” than you can with “all the eyeballs that are going to see that masthead on a particular day.”
Beer advertisers must make sure that a minimum of 71.6% of their ad’s audience is of legal drinking age, in line with the nation’s population, according to the Beer Institute’s advertising/marketing code and buyer guidelines. This number is expected to go up this year with the release of the 2020 census, causing beer advertisers to be more conservative with where they are advertising.