Google will take your videos itself. The brand stops deciding what represents it

A video you shot for Instagram can, since last week, appear as an advertisement without anyone approving it. Google switched this on by default in Performance Max. Technically it is a toggle in an ad account. Practically it is a question every brand has to answer before a machine answers it for them.

What happened

Performance Max now goes through linked social accounts, landing pages and a YouTube channel and picks up to ten videos for one asset group. On newly created campaigns it is on. The technical account of it, and where to switch it off, is with our sister agency in a piece on sourced videos in Performance Max.

We are interested in something else. Not whether it is on, but what it means for a brand that has spent years building a consistent voice.

A post and an ad are not the same thing

Content for social media is made differently. It opens differently, because people meet it in a different frame of mind. It takes more playfulness, because it sits beside the rest of your account, and that context carries half the meaning. Often a specific person speaks in it, someone your followers know.

The moment the same video runs as an ad in front of strangers, that context is gone. What remains is ten seconds with no frame. Sometimes it works better than a produced ad. Sometimes it looks as if the brand had not noticed where it was sending it.

An ad is a different kind of use than a post. The difference is not in the file, it is in what stands around it.

The second thing is rights

Music in a social video is usually licensed through that platform's library, and that licence covers content on that platform. A creator speaking in the video agreed to appear on your channel. Whether either covers paid advertising is a question for a contract, not for an ad system.

Google has published no guidance on music or creator rights for this feature. That alone does not mean there is a problem. It means the answer will not come from anyone but you.

What we do with the brands we run

We do not recommend switching it off across the board. For some brands this material is the best thing they have, and a produced ad next to it looks dead.

We recommend deciding it. Once, for the whole brand, and writing it where the rest of the expression rules live. There are three questions: may our social content run as advertising, which channels are in scope, and what must never be in them. The answers fit in four lines of a brand guideline.

Whoever does not decide has also decided. They just do not know it, and will find out from an ad somebody forwards them.

Why we are writing this

This will not be the last change of its kind. Defaults in ad systems keep moving towards picking material on their own, and brands whose guidelines say only colours and logo have no answer to that. A brand guideline that says nothing about using work somewhere other than where it was made for is incomplete today.

If you are working out how a brand should look across channels, this is a good excuse to do it. We build brands and packaging, so we run into questions like this before they show up in an ad account.