Traditional advertising models involve buying specific bits of media — a 30-second advert on TV, for example. While a lot of people will see the ad, only a few will be interested. Programmatic advertising promised to change all that.
Algorithms identify potential customers and serve them adverts wherever they browse on the web. Using computerised exchanges, such tools buy adverts on sites such as YouTube in the milliseconds it takes the web page to load.
Programmatic advertising is the reason a jacket you once thought of buying now follows you around the internet. Used correctly, it is startingly effective. A political party can serve adverts to people living in marginal seats or within a certain age group.
However, many brands are realising that it can damage their reputation. Programmatic advertising does not care about context. It could serve a Rolex advert on an online porn video as long as it was watched by a City banker. Many media agencies, and Google, attempt to mitigate this danger by offering controls on what sort of content adverts will appear against.
However, as a long-running investigation by The Times has shown, such controls are imperfect. In February we revealed that Mercedes-Benz, Waitrose, Marie Curie and dozens of other companies were inadvertently funding Islamic extremists, white supremacists and pornographers by advertising on their websites.
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After follow-up stories in March, dozens of brands pulled out of YouTube. The scandal is estimated to cost Google more than $750 million.
Today’s revelations — that political parties were promoted on extremist YouTube videos — has prompted equal fury. Whether it provokes any real change remains to be seen.
YouTube fundamentalists
Khaled al-Rashed is a Saudi preacher who has been used to recruit for Isis. Many of his videos have run adverts for major brands.
Wagdi Ghoneim is an Egyptian-Qatari preacher who was banned from Britain in 2009 because he was considered to “foment, justify or glorify terrorist violence”. The BBC was among brands advertised on his videos.
Steven Anderson is a hate preacher banned from entering Britain last year after calling homosexuals “sodomites, queers and faggots” and calling for gay people to be killed. Channel 4 is one of the brands advertised.
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David Duke is a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and a Holocaust denier. His videos have been seen more than 14 million times and advertised many brands.
Google blocked ads on all of these platforms after the Times contacted it.