We present a scalable and agile approach for ads image content moderation at Google, addressing the challenges of moderating massive volumes of ads with diverse content and evolving policies. The proposed method utilizes human-curated textual descriptions and cross-modal text-image co-embeddings to enable zero-shot classification of policy violating ads images, bypassing the need for extensive supervised training data and human labeling. By leveraging large language models (LLMs) and user expertise, the system generates and refines a comprehensive set of textual descriptions representing policy guidelines. During inference, co-embedding similarity between incoming images and the textual descriptions serves as a reliable signal for policy violation detection, enabling efficient and adaptable ads content moderation. Evaluation results demonstrate the efficacy of this framework in significantly boosting the detection of policy violating content.

Online ads showing e-commerce products typically rely on the product images in a catalog sent to the advertising platform by an e-commerce platform. In the broader ads industry such ads are called dynamic product ads (DPA). It is common for DPA catalogs to be in the scale of millions (corresponding to the scale of products which can be bought from the e-commerce platform). However, not all product images in the catalog may be appealing when directly re-purposed as an ad image, and this may lead to lower click-through rates (CTRs). In particular, products just placed against a solid background may not be as enticing and realistic as a product staged in a natural environment. To address such shortcomings of DPA images at scale, we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) based approach to generate staged backgrounds for un-staged product images. Generating the entire staged background is a challenging task susceptible to hallucinations. To get around this, we introduce a simpler approach called copy-paste staging using retrieval assisted GANs. In copy paste staging, we first retrieve (from the catalog) staged products similar to the un-staged input product, and then copy-paste the background of the retrieved product in the input image. A GAN based in-painting model is used to fill the holes left after this copy-paste operation. We show the efficacy of our copy-paste staging method via offline metrics, and human evaluation. In addition, we show how our staging approach can enable animations of moving products leading to a video ad from a product image.

Modeling what makes an advertisement persuasive, i.e., eliciting the desired response from consumer, is critical to the study of propaganda, social psychology, and marketing. Despite its importance, computational modeling of persuasion in computer vision is still in its infancy, primarily due to the lack of benchmark datasets that can provide persuasion-strategy labels associated with ads. Motivated by persuasion literature in social psychology and marketing, we introduce an extensive vocabulary of persuasion strategies and build the first ad image corpus annotated with persuasion strategies. We then formulate the task of persuasion strategy prediction with multi-modal learning, where we design a multi-task attention fusion model that can leverage other ad-understanding tasks to predict persuasion strategies. Further, we conduct a real-world case study on 1600 advertising campaigns of 30 Fortune-500 companies where we use our model's predictions to analyze which strategies work with different demographics (age and gender). The dataset also provides image segmentation masks, which labels persuasion strategies in the corresponding ad images on the test split. We publicly release our code and dataset https://midas-research.github.io/persuasion-advertisements/.

Consumers are exposed to advertisements across many different domains on the internet, such as fashion, beauty, car, food, and others. On the other hand, fashion represents second highest e-commerce shopping category. Does consumer digital record behavior on various fashion ad images reveal their fashion taste? Does ads from other domains infer their fashion taste as well? In this paper, we study the correlation between advertisements and fashion taste. Towards this goal, we introduce a new dataset, Fashionpedia-Ads, which asks subjects to provide their preferences on both ad (fashion, beauty, car, and dessert) and fashion product (social network and e-commerce style) images. Furthermore, we exhaustively collect and annotate the emotional, visual and textual information on the ad images from multi-perspectives (abstractive level, physical level, captions, and brands). We open-source Fashionpedia-Ads to enable future studies and encourage more approaches to interpretability research between advertisements and fashion taste.

Assessing advertisements, specifically on the basis of user preferences and ad quality, is crucial to the marketing industry. Although recent studies have attempted to use deep neural networks for this purpose, these studies have not utilized image-related auxiliary attributes, which include embedded text frequently found in ad images. We, therefore, investigated the influence of these attributes on ad image preferences. First, we analyzed large-scale real-world ad log data and, based on our findings, proposed a novel multi-step modality fusion network (M2FN) that determines advertising images likely to appeal to user preferences. Our method utilizes auxiliary attributes through multiple steps in the network, which include conditional batch normalization-based low-level fusion and attention-based high-level fusion. We verified M2FN on the AVA dataset, which is widely used for aesthetic image assessment, and then demonstrated that M2FN can achieve state-of-the-art performance in preference prediction using a real-world ad dataset with rich auxiliary attributes.

Online advertising has been a long-standing concern for user privacy and overall web experience. Several techniques have been proposed to block ads, mostly based on filter-lists and manually-written rules. While a typical ad blocker relies on manually-curated block lists, these inevitably get out-of-date, thus compromising the ultimate utility of this ad blocking approach. In this paper we present Percival, a browser-embedded, lightweight, deep learning-powered ad blocker. Percival embeds itself within the browser's image rendering pipeline, which makes it possible to intercept every image obtained during page execution and to perform blocking based on applying machine learning for image classification to flag potential ads. Our implementation inside both Chromium and Brave browsers shows only a minor rendering performance overhead of 4.55%, demonstrating the feasibility of deploying traditionally heavy models (i.e. deep neural networks) inside the critical path of the rendering engine of a browser. We show that our image-based ad blocker can replicate EasyList rules with an accuracy of 96.76%. To show the versatility of the Percival's approach we present case studies that demonstrate that Percival 1) does surprisingly well on ads in languages other than English; 2) Percival also performs well on blocking first-party Facebook ads, which have presented issues for other ad blockers. Percival proves that image-based perceptual ad blocking is an attractive complement to today's dominant approach of block lists

In online display advertising, state-of-the-art Click Through Rate(CTR) prediction algorithms rely heavily on historical information, and they work poorly on growing number of new ads without any historical information. This is known as the the cold start problem. For image ads, current state-of-the-art systems use handcrafted image features such as multimedia features and SIFT features to capture the attractiveness of ads. However, these handcrafted features are task dependent, inflexible and heuristic. In order to tackle the cold start problem in image display ads, we propose a new feature learning architecture to learn the most discriminative image features directly from raw pixels and user feedback in the target task. The proposed method is flexible and does not depend on human heuristic. Extensive experiments on a real world dataset with 47 billion records show that our feature learning method outperforms existing handcrafted features significantly, and it can extract discriminative and meaningful features.