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Fortune 500 brand ads seen next to porn & racial slurs, with IAS & DoubleVerify in the mix
Source: The Drum
August 7th, 2024
Summary: Adalytics strikes again. This time, the independent ad quality research firm has found that the world's biggest brands have run ads alongside pornographic, violent, and otherwise offensive content on the open web. Many of the campaigns in question were executed by agency holding companies and seemingly were not flagged by brand safety and verification vendors.
Adalytics says that it analyzed publicly available data and found that many brands hired third-party vendors for brand safety solutions and keyword blocking, but their ads still appeared next to inappropriate content. Adalytics found source code of these ads with tags from ad verification vendors such as Integral Ad Science (IAS), DoubleVerify and Oracle Moat.
IAS and DoubleVerify both use AI and machine learning to classify online content for risk. DoubleVerify pushed back on the findings, which it called "manufactured," arguing that Adalytics didn't provide any context about the brand safety parameters set by the brands, so lax settings configured by the advertiser or agency may explain why some ads appeared next to questionable content. The vendor also said that Adalytics misunderstood its code, since some of the examples cited are related to its publisher tools for metrics like video view completion. In other words, Adalytics may be faulting DV's tech for brands that are not actually its clients, according to the vendor.
Opinion: Newsflash: Brand safety is a problem in programmatic advertising!
Here’s the deal: When brands use programmatic platforms to buy ad space at scale through auctions in the open market, there is always going to be some level of risk. That’s because it’s real time, it’s digital advertising, no technology is perfect, bad actors are constantly working to outsmart said technology, and sh*t happens. A brand may run ads next to unsafe content, be exposed to fraud, have frequency and competitive separation issues, etc. And in exchange for taking on risk, that brand (may) reap the upside of programmatic advertising: scale, efficiency, and effectiveness.
Of course, a brand should do everything it possibly can to mitigate its brand safety risk. Here’s the spectrum of techniques a brand can use to mitigate their brand safety risk, from least effective to most effective:
The last one is important. If you’re going to advertise anywhere, you’re always going to take on some level of brand risk. Remember when FedEx sponsored the Super Bowl XXXVIII Halftime Show?
This is not a free pass for the industry. Everyone needs to be better: publishers, ad tech companies, ad verification companies, etc. But at the end of the day, brands need to be realistic about risk and use mitigation techniques to minimize it as much as possible. And realize that it's always going to be there.
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