YouTube is yet again in trouble as major brands pull their advertising on the video-sharing platform.
Not for the first time in YouTube’s recent historyOpens a new window , it has emerged that numerous YouTube videos with tens of millions of cumulative views are being inundated with comments by pedophiles – as Wired put it in an article this week, “a network of pedophiles is hiding in plain sight.â€
Predators appear to be commenting on otherwise harmless YouTube videos of children engaged in activities from gymnastics to vlogging, the users sharing timestamps for segments in the videos where these children are accidentally exposing their genitals or can be seen in compromising positions (for example, performing splits or accidentally lifting tops to expose a bare midriff).
Many of the videos, which often include gratuitous and predatory comments, have attracted hundreds of thousands or even millions of views.
While this in itself should already be a serious concern, companies including Nestlé, Epic Games, Disney and Hasbro are only now boycotting YouTubeOpens a new window following a recent video posted on the platform by YouTuber Matt Watson (whose channel name is MattsWhatItIs) exposing the fact that YouTube is monetizing video content used to sexually exploit minors.
In the 20-minute-plus videoOpens a new window , which racked some 2.5 million views since being posted on Sunday, Watson accuses YouTube’s algorithm of even “facilitating†the spread of these videos, with its recommendation system guiding pedophiles to other similar videos of children.
The big issue from a marketing perspective is that many of these videos carry advertisements of major brands and companies – either in the preroll automatically embedded in the video or on the web page as a static image next to these videos.
Although Alphabet-owned YouTube has been quick to respond to the PR crisisOpens a new window , shutting down hundreds of channels associated with this type of inappropriate content and also disabling comments on millions of videos showing minors, the exodus is already under way as many companies justifiably worry about their brand safety on the media-sharing site.
Indeed, Google’s programmatic media-buying platform has struggled with brand-safety-related problems in the past. In 2016, YouTube faced major backlashOpens a new window after the story broke that ads for many of the biggest companies in the world were placed on channels promoting inappropriate videos, thus inadvertently funding extremist-produced content (among them, white supremacists, Nazi sympathizers and terrorist-linked content creators).
AT&T, one of the companies that froze all its YouTube spending this week, only resumed advertising on the website last month following a two-year hiatus in response to that scandal. The only reason it returned was because YouTube implemented a new set of measures and controls meant to protect brand safety.
And yet, weeks later, more of the same.
Similarly, just last year a CNN exposé found that “ads from over 300 companies and organizations — including tech giants, major retailers, newspapers and government agencies — ran on YouTube channels promoting white nationalists, Nazis, pedophilia, conspiracy theories and North Korean propaganda… Companies such as Adidas, Amazon, Cisco, Facebook, Hershey, Hilton, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Netflix, Nordstrom and Under Armour may have unknowingly helped finance some of these channels via the advertisements they paid for on Google-owned YouTube.â€
Marketers must own brand safety
So what can brands do to ensure their campaigns aren’t – unbeknown to them – teetering on the dangerous side of the issue?
Fellow Toolbox contributor Ethan Schrieberg actually wrote on the topicOpens a new window earlier this month in which he discusses some of the tactics, tools and strategies marketers can use in order to maintain better control of their brand safety.
Among his points, he mentions:
- The need for an editorial brand safety guide that helps marketers to delineate “safe†versus “unsafe†content.
- Automated tools that can be used to evaluate the risk of potential ad hosts (for example, websites) by assessing the content on thousands of web pages. One such technology is DoubleVerify’s Authentic Brand Safety solutionOpens a new window , which released a beta version YouTube brand safety solution in December 2018.
- An organization called the Brand Safety InstituteOpens a new window  was launched last year that can help identify best practices for a business, as well as offer a certification program and various relevant trainings and resources for Brand Safety Officers.
Ultimately, with brand safety increasingly a hot-button topic, marketers must take the steps necessary to establish guidelines and to know where their ads are being placed.
As programmatic ad buying becomes an ever-more popular way of winning ad space, brands must be aware of what they are paying for and try to manage where their ads are placed online, while marketing leaders ensure their team has brand safety expertise on board.