Microsoft Advertising sent out emails to its advertisers about changes to its advertising policies that start off next week on July 1st.

Microsoft said, "Microsoft Advertising will be rolling out new policies and resources intended to provide greater visibility. In addition to these updates, we will be updating some of our advertising policies with a focus on helping you reach greater audiences for some products and services, some updates to help further protect those who use our products and services, and some updates to align with upcoming regulatory changes."

Here are the updates from what Microsoft emailed me:

Transparency updates

• Beginning July 1st, we will implement a new policy that outlines different impacts to your advertising account. This policy will provide context about ways that your ads or account may be impacted including:
• Ad and ad component disapprovals such as keyword, ad copy, or landing page for example.
• Store or product disapproval.
• A three-strikes policy for repeated policy violations. Our policies already disallowed repeat violations, this provides more details and structure to that policy.
• Egregious violations that may result in immediate suspension of services. This was already part of policy enforcement; the updates provide additional details about what falls into this category.
• We are also expanding our Advertising Identification Verification (AIV) program to all supported advertising markets. You must complete verification by August 1st. If you have not already done so, you will receive an email notification when it is time to complete your verification. We will update the verification status automatically.
• In July, we will be launching a new Ad Library where all users will have the ability to view ads shown on Bing that may have had impressions within the European Union. Users will be able to search using an advertiser name or words that may be included in the ad creative. The advertisers’ name and who paid for the ad will be displayed with the ad in the Ad Library based on the information provided through the AIV process.

Additional policy updates

• Advertising for vitamins and supplements is now allowed on the Microsoft Audience Network. Ads cannot claim to complete a task such as cleansing the liver. Landing pages must be product pages, they cannot be advertorials or videos.
• Gambling advertising is now allowed on the Microsoft Audience Network where allowed by policy, to participate, you must be licensed in any market you will target and have gone through the gambling enablement process and obtained approval for those markets.
• Beginning July 1st, gambling advertising is no longer allowed in Belgium, please remove targeting for this market if you are currently advertising gambling in Belgium. We will also begin system enforcement at this time.
• Advertising for gambling in Ireland will also become more restricted, with a watershed being introduced soon. The exact date for this is still pending, however we recommend if you have gambling ads targeting Ireland you update your campaign settings to ensure your ads are not serving between 5:30 am and 9:00 pm.
• Effective August 1st, we will no longer allow advertising for clinical trials or experimental treatments globally, across all ad types.

Page updates not related to policy changes

• Some markets may appear to have been removed, these markets are still available; they will follow the policies for the markets to which they are aligned.
• Some content is being moved to different pages for better alignment with similar policies.
• Additional clarifications and examples are being added for greater clarity on some of our policy pages.
• Publisher preferences such as those for MSN, Outlook, and Xbox for example, are being removed from the policy pages and will be maintained within a new help document, this document will be linked from the policy page navigation menu.

You can check out more on the policy site.

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