EXCLUSIVE: Westpac and Sony pulled online advertising campaigns within hours of each other after being informed by AdNews that their display ads targeting Australian users were being carried by soft porn websites.
But Google, Coles, ING Direct, HSBC and Telstra have also been caught up in the shady placement of online ads, with Telstra and HSBC appearing on a file-sharing site which could facilitate illegal content downloading under copyright law in some countries.
Adconion, the online advertising network carrying the TVLinks website, dumped the site immediately from its network after being presented with screenshots of Telstra and HSBC ads by AdNews yesterday.
“It’s being pulled as we speak,” Adconion managing director Peter Davie said. “We don’t want it in our network.” Davie said the site was “compliant” with standards from the Internet Advertising Standards House (IASH), but the site was pulled because it might be in a “grey area”.
“We’re just going to use common sense. We consider safe sites for brands to be crucial,” he said. The chief executive of Omnicom Media Group, Leigh Terry, which handles the Telstra media account through its media agency OMD, said: “We book in good faith with our preferred network partners in the knowledge that they are IASH-compliant. We diligently investigate any claimed breaches of our terms, and, if proven to be correct, we initiate the strongest recourse open to us, seeking a level of compensation commensurate with the severity of the breaches.”
Terry said Adconion’s decision to pull the TVLinks website was “very responsible”.
“If there’s any doubt, don’t do it,” he said. “Where there is grey area or ambiguity, we will ensure that our clients’ brands are protected by avoiding any association with the sites in question.”
In a statement from Westpac over its ad for credit cards, which appears on a soft porn site with the headline ‘Oops Brides in Underwear Hot Photos’, the bank said: “Westpac is vigilant about where its brand and advertising appears. As soon as we were made aware of the situation we tracked down those responsible to pull down the ads. Protocols have been immediately implemented to ensure this does not occur again.”
All of Westpac’s ‘biddable’ display advertising schedules have been frozen.
It is understood Westpac’s campaign was bought through Downstream and may have involved Google’s ad network. Google said: “We don’t comment on specific sites. When sites in our Ad Exchange violate our policies we take quick action and disable ad serving.” It was still unclear whether Google is involved with any of the porn websites carrying Australian brand advertisers but it was investigating.
Sony also released a statement to AdNews. The company said its ads had run in a category called User Generated Content (UGC) which includes sites like YouTube and Facebook.
“The offending site is categorised under UGC. The only way to exclude this type of content is to exclude UGC content as a whole, which we have now done,” Sony said. “Is Sony aware of the risk of its brand appearing on soft porn websites? We have become aware of the risk and of course it is undesirable and unacceptable for the Sony brand to appear within a soft porn environment.”
However, Sony backed its media agency Starcom MediaVest and its use of low-cost ‘blind buy’ ad networks, which means companies don’t know which sites their ads appear on.
“At a certain point, Starcom relies on third party brand safety technologies to manage the vast volume of content and environments across the web,” Sony said.
On the use of the blind buying of website networks it said: “Our agency, Starcom, takes this approach for direct response style advertising due to the strong sales results this approach drives. The Christmas campaign, which was featured, is heavily direct response-focused and includes a high proportion of self-optimising activity.”
Coles too has been embroiled in the online fiasco – a 50% off offer for a Macleans toothbrush sits along side a buxom woman on a site called weirdexistence.com.
Henry Tajer, the chairman of Mediabrands, the parent company to UM, said the online ad networks responsible for placing ads in these environments would be pursued.
“They are going to need to explain themselves,” Tajer said. “We need to know for that [Coles ad] to appear, how many rogue sites there are in the network, what does it represent as a total of activity, is it an anomaly and what the cause behind it was. These providers commit to not having that type of advertising on their network.”
This article first appeared in the November 18 edition of AdNews. Click here to subscribe for more news, features and opinion.
Follow @AdNews on Twitter for breaking stories and campaigns throughout the day.
Have something to say? Send us your comments using the form below or contact the writer at paulmcintyre@yaffa.com.au
Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au
Sign up to the AdNews newsletter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for breaking stories and campaigns throughout the day.