ATT, Verizon and several other major advertisers are suspending their marketing campaigns on Google’s YouTube site after discovering their brands have been appearing alongside videos promoting terrorism and other unsavory subjects.
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The spreading boycott confronts Google with a challenge that threatens to cost it hundreds of millions of dollars.
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YouTube’s popularity stems from its massive and eclectic library of video, spanning everything from polished TV clips to raw diatribes posted by people bashing homosexuals.
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But that diverse selection periodically allows ads to appear next to videos that marketers find distasteful, despite Google’s efforts to prevent it from happening.
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Google depends largely on automated programs to place ads in YouTube videos because the job is too much for humans to handle on their own. About 400 hours of video is now posted on YouTube each minute.
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Earlier this week, Google vowed to step up its efforts to block ads on hateful, offensive and derogatory videos.
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We know that this is unacceptable to the advertisers and agencies who put their trust in us, Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, wrote in a Tuesday blog post.
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As part of Google’s solution to the problem, Schindler promised to hire significant numbers of employees to review YouTube videos and flag them as inappropriate for ads. He also predicted YouTube would be able to address advertisers’ concerns through Google’s recent advancements in artificial intelligence — technology parlance for computers that learn to think like humans.
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But that promise so far hasn’t appeased ATT, Verizon Communications and an expanding global list of advertisers that includes Volkswagen, Audi, HSBC Holdings, the Royal Bank of Scotland and L’Oreal.
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We are deeply concerned that our ads may have appeared alongside YouTube content promoting terrorism and hate, ATT said in a statement. Until Google can ensure this won’t happen again, we are removing our ads from Google’s non-search platforms.
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By extending…