It never rains but pours for YouTube. It is once again facing an advertiser fallout from major brands and could prove to be really costful.
YouTube is promising a crackdown, but it’s too late for some brands. Cadbury chocolates maker Mondelez , Lidl, Mars, HP and other consumer goods marketers have pulled advertising from YouTube after an investigation found the video sharing-site was showing clips of scantily clad children alongside the ads of major brands.
Comments from hundreds of paedophiles were posted alongside the videos, which appeared to have been uploaded by the children themselves, according to a Times investigation. One clip of a pre-teenage girl in a nightie drew 6.5 million views.
YouTube, a unit of Alphabet subsidiary Google , is accused of allowing sexualised imagery of children to be easily searchable and not lived up to promises to better monitor and police its services to protect children.
In response, a YouTube spokesman said: “There shouldn’t be any ads running on this content and we are working urgently to fix this”
The UK arm of German discount retailer Lidl, Diageo, the maker of Smirnoff vodka and Johnnie Walker whisky, and chocolate makers Mondelez and Mars confirmed they had pulled advertising campaigns from YouTube.
“We are shocked and appalled to see that our adverts have appeared alongside such exploitative and inappropriate content,” said Mars in a statement.
“We have taken the decision to immediately suspend all our online advertising on YouTube and Google globally… Until we have confidence that appropriate safeguards are in place, we will not advertise on YouTube and Google.”
A Lidl UK spokeswoman said it was “completely unacceptable that this content is available to view, and it is, therefore, clear that the strict policies which Google has assured us were in place to tackle offensive content are ineffective”.
Diageo said it had begun an urgent investigation and halted all YouTube advertising until it was confident the appropriate safeguards are in place. Computers and printers company HP blamed the problem on a “content misclassification” by Google and instructed it to suspend all of its advertising globally on YouTube.
YouTube has already been taking down exploitative videos and disabling ads for other clips. It’s “working urgently to fix this . In a statement, YouTube stressed that it was clamping down on videos that might give “cause for concern” even if their content was illegal. .
However, the move clearly came too late for many of the advertisers — they want to know their ads won’t display next to horrifying videos or comments. And like the uproar over videos promoting hate speech and extremism, it appears that companies are taking action because YouTube took a long time to respond.
It also suggests that YouTube’s dependence on a mix of algorithmic filtering, trusted viewers and reports from authorities isn’t enough to prevent significant numbers of questionable or illegal videos from slipping through the cracks.
7 Comments
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…therefore maintaining the brand’s image. ??
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