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Not many people know this but the compliance team at IG is so strict that when they order Chinese food to the office, they ask the Deliveroo driver if the sweet and sour pork has been prepared in accordance with MiFID II regulatory standards. And if the kung pao chicken doesn’t have a risk warning with the number of peanut-based allergic reactions suffered by consumers over the last three months? It’s not getting through the door.
Others take a more ‘laissez faire’ approach to life. It’s a sign that, contrary to what you might expect, the law is not a rigid, steel-like substance, giving shape to the rules that govern our world. More often it’s made of malleable stuff that can be moulded to the form most suited to our current needs.
I thought about this recently because of a Google case study that involves broker IQ Option. This is actually one of my favourite companies, along with Olymp Trade and Pocket Option, because they are simultaneously gigantic – Pocket Option claims it had close to 70m app downloads – and completely under the radar.
The case study involves a campaign in Saudi Arabia. IQ Option used Google’s AI tools, along with an ad agency called OHM, to launch the campaign. The basic claims in the case study are that they used Google’s AI video creation tools, Veo 3 and Nano Banana, to make a bunch of localised creatives for the Saudi Arabian market.
This led to…
- Estimated $180k lower production costs
- 25.4% lower CPA
- 25% uplift to conversion rate
- Time to market reduced by ~1 month
Saudi Arabia is obviously a market that lots of people want to tap into but you can’t because there is no local license you can use. That means that Google will block you and your own compliance team will block you.
But clearly that’s not the case here as not only did Google allow IQ Option to do this, but they were happy to publish a case study about it afterwards. More remarkable is that IQ Option’s entity that onboards Saudis is in Antigua. So what gives? How are they able to do this?
My initial thought that this was because the ads ran via OHM – the marketing agency – rather than IQ Option. Having a third-party run your ads is a way to get around some Google restrictions. OHM is indeed running some ads for IQ Option, along with FxPro and 1xBet, at the moment.
But the ads appear to have been run primarily from IQ Option’s own Google account. Indeed, IQ Option has run over 2,000 ads in the last month for its different brands, including Exnova and Sabio Trade.
In the same way, you could have ‘ads’ that display your app or showcase your product but do not involve you actually marketing a financial product. This is one of IQ Option’s ads in Saudi Arabia…
…which looks like it should breach the rules but maybe it doesn’t? What this may reflect is what we said at the beginning about the law. In some markets it seems like Google is a lot more ‘flexible’ than in others. For example, IG must be one of the most risk averse firms in the industry and they still got banned by Google in France for six years.
Meanwhile I have a feeling that if you go to account managers in other parts of the world, they will go ‘hey bro, yes you can’t advertise this product in Saudi Arabia but if you remove the logarithmic scale on the side of your chart then it’s fine.’ But that’s just my theory. Another compelling factor may be related to the following chart….
Either way, the bottom line is that some people can make it work if they want to. It’s just many won’t have the account manager or internal compliance team to make it happen.
As for the results, I find them simultaneously depressing and amazing. To entirely remove a real life camera crew and group of editors is something that was not possible 5 years ago. On the other hand, the end result is hardly a ‘beautiful’ work of art, as it’s obviously AI-generated slop.
However, the fact that it works – and is likely working for other firms like eToro and Deriv – means you’ll see it more often. I for one saw an eToro AI ad recently and thought it was so crass and tawdry that I couldn’t believe anyone would want to use the company’s services from watching it.
But immediately afterwards I went to buy a blackout blind in B&Q. I walked across the parking lot and surveyed the hordes of predominantly rotund people waddling through it. And I realised I was wrong.
