Big brands such as Johnson & Johnson, McDonald’s, and PepsiCo along with hundreds of other companies have yanked their advertising from YouTube following concerns that their content was appearing alongside of inappropriate videos, including those produced by terrorists. Brands don’t want their names associated with such videos and they don’t want their advertising dollars supporting terrorist organizations.
The boycott is expected to shave 7.5% off of YouTube’s annual revenue of $10.2 billion, according to Nomura Instinet and Fortune. At the same time, brands boycotting YouTube are missing out on an opportunity to promote their products to approximately 1.3 billion users of the video platform.
Not surprisingly, vendors are jumping into the fray with various approaches to either resolve the issue or provide alternatives to the video platform. News Corp Australia is just one example. The company maintains that its media is viewed by more than 7 million Australians daily and it has just launched a month-long campaign with the tagline “Do you know where your ad is today? News Does.”
In a press release, the company says the campaign is intended to make marketers and brands question where their advertising dollars are going. It maintains that News Corp products are some of the most trusted digital environments within which brands can advertise.
Rich Sutton, CRO of Trusted Media Brands, Inc., echoes News Corp’s approach. In a recent MediaPost article, he maintains that brands will eventually realize that human intervention is required to guarantee brand safety. Once they reach that conclusion, they will retreat from programmatic advertising and do business with premium publishers (such as Trusted Media).
Sutton’s company offers a variety of publications, with the most well-known brand being Reader’s Digest. Not surprisingly, technology firms are maintaining that they have a role in the brand safety battleground.
Comscore has announced that it has been selected by Google to provide independent brand safety reporting for campaigns on YouTube, reports ResearchLive. Comscore offers the technology as part of its Campaign Essentials suite. Omnicom Media Group is another firm that is pitching technology to address brand safety. The agency represents companies such as Pepsi, P&G, and AT&T that have boycotted YouTube.
As reported in AdAge, the company’s new technology combines artificial intelligence and, in some cases, human viewers to assess thousands of videos daily and determine if the content is appropriate. Jon Anselmo, Omnicom's chief digital officer, says the technology will create whitelists of safe videos.
The process is a shift from YouTube’s traditional practice of punishing publishers that have already posted inappropriate videos. For YouTube, eliminating bad videos after the fact is ineffective because of the limitless inventory of content, he maintains.
WPP, which is a competitor to Omnicom, is also pitching technology that it is offering through a partnership with the video ad-tech firm OpenSlate. The service whitelists YouTube channels for brands and assesses which videos are worth advertisers’ money. OpenSlate says it sorts through hundreds of millions of videos to come up with a select group of channels. Mike Henry, OpenSlate's CEO, argues that brands are starting to realize that they are responsible for ensuring that their advertisements appear alongside appropriate content rather than rely on YouTube to screen out bad apples.