ISBA director of media and advertising Bob Wootton has claimed “new media is effectively biting the hand that feeds it” by failing to act over online adverts appearing on inappropriate social media pages.
Wootton’s comments come after The Drum revealed the FBrape campaign which demands ‘swift, comprehensive and effective action addressing the representation of rape and domestic violence on Facebook’ has received over 50,000 Twitter mentions and over a dozen brands, including Nissan UK and Nationwide, have pulled their advertising after ads appeared next to groups, pages or images that condone or encourage domestic abuse and rape.
“Advertisers are rightly concerned with their ads appearing on websites that are bad taste at best and highly offensive, or illegal, at worst; why should they spend years and millions of pounds establishing their reputation only to have that investment damaged, possibly irrevocably, by something they have virtually no control over?
“The excuse from the likes of the new media giants that ‘we are just a pipe’, is, frankly, wearing thin. They need to honour the trust imbued in them by their clients – the companies that fund them – otherwise they might well see more advertisers taking their cash elsewhere,” remarked Wootton.
As online adverts are ‘programmatically’ placed based on a wide array of information from the users’ computer the ISBA has called for the technology that is used to target consumers employed to prevent online ads from appearing on offensive sites.
Wootton adds: “Well-targeted ads use anonymised data so that, for example, those of us who own pets will never have to be served a dog or cat-food ad, and so on. Why can’t similarly sophisticated technology be employed to the benefit of the advertiser too? A sincere attempt to answer this question might well stem the flow of advertisers which are leaving social networking sites for less riskier, display advertising alternatives.”