Enough is enough ! The Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control condemns Taboola’s misleading practices.
The company is fined 650,000 euros for having broadcast advertising campaigns that contravene the principles of truthfulness and fairness applicable to all advertising.
When Taboola pedals in semolina
During your wanderings on the Web, you have necessarily already been confronted one day with sponsored content from Taboola, a network specializing in online advertising. These are generally arranged at the bottom of an article, with the same recipe applied to each of them, namely a very (very) eye-catching, even misleading title, and content that is anecdotal to say the least. Today, Fraud Enforcement felt that the company had overstepped its bounds.
” A DGCCRF investigation revealed that the advertising management companies TABOOLA FRANCE SAS and TABOOLA EUROPE LTD did not verify the fairness of online advertisements. They pay a transactional fine of 650,000 euros “, can we read on the site of the DGCCRF.
Misleading commercial practices and a fine of 650,000 euros
In fact, and despite various upstream alerts from the Advertising Professionals Regulatory Authority, the DGCCRF, which tracks this kind of practice, estimated that Taboola continued to broadcast advertisements with misleading content. It should be remembered that the company nevertheless undertakes with its advertiser clients and publishers selling their advertising space to verify the fairness of all advertisements before they are broadcast.
Despite this, the latter could in particular take on a false editorial appearance when it was advertising content,
include unsubstantiated claims about the expected effects of various products,
discredit the medical approach,
or promote treatments requiring prior diagnosis and medical monitoring.
These deceptive marketing practices have had direct consequences on consumers, exposed to unverified and misleading advertising content. Also, a transactional fine of 650,000 euros was jointly proposed to the companies Taboola France and Taboola Europe, which accepted it. The company posts the decision of the DGCCRF on its website.
Source : The world
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