Adverts for hundreds of major global brands including Disney, Meta, Ikea, Mercedes Benz, Microsoft, and Nestlé have appeared next to racial slurs, pornographic imagery and other harmful content.
A damning new report from Adalytics analysed publicly available data to assess brand safety across the internet.
The adverts for the brands were seen across a variety of websites and pages including user-generated Wiki Fandom pages, appearing next to titles such as ‘Big Black Dildo’, ‘Zoophilia’, ‘Super Mario 3 Masturbation’, and offensive racist slurs.
The report highlighted that many of the adverts included code from brand security-focused vendors like Double Verify and Integral Ad Science.
Double Verify refuted the claims in Adalytics report, issuing a statement which described the report as “part of a concerning trend where third-party research lacks the information knowledge, understanding necessary to evaluate the nuances of media verification”.
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It also said the screenshots contained within the report contain code relating to its publisher service rather than its advertiser service.
However, the Adalytics report quoted Fortune 500 brand marketers, who said that “transparency for advertisers needed to be adopted immediately by all DSPs, but also the brand safety and verification technologies that claim to have been providing URL and Page Level protection.”
Another anonymised Fortune 500 brand marketer asked: “Is verification tech implemented correctly but not working? If so huge problem. Does not seem to be doing any page level scanning.
“Ultimately, advertisers want 100% of their ads to be in safe, suitable, viewable environments delivered to real consumers. Currently that is almost impossible to do at scale.”
The report stated that the code from IAS and DoubleVerify could have been related to viewability, monitoring or fraud detection, or could be related to brand safety functionality.
A previous report from Adalytics had looked at where Google had placed adverts finding that many were located next to websites hosting pornographic, zoophilic and pirated content.
The new findings come in the wake of a wider discussion about brand safety in relation to social media, in the wake of Elon Musk’s decision to sue advertisers who boycotted the platform after he appeared to express agreement with an antisemitic statement.
