Ads on Facebook dropped after appearing next to offensive posts
May 28, 2013 7:56 pm
By Robert Budden, Chief Media Correspondent
Major advertisers including Nissan and Nationwide have
suspended Facebook marketing campaigns after their ads appeared alongside
offensive posts, highlighting the risks of a new form of “targeted”
advertising.
The cancellations follow complaints on Twitter and from
women’s rights organisations over the publication of misogynistic content,
including images of abused women, on the social networking site.
Targeted advertising identifies that a person is likely
to buy a particular product, and then automatically places ads for that product
on whatever page he or she visits.
Adverts for Japanese carmaker Nissan, Nationwide, the
UK’s largest building society, Unilever’s Dove skincare brand, were
automatically placed next to the offensive images that Facebook users either
sought out or stumbled upon accidentally. To the companies’ embarrassment,
screenshots juxtaposing the misogynistic images with their products were then
widely circulated.
Nationwide said it had pulled its Facebook adverts
pending resolution of the situation. Dove said it was working with Facebook to
have the offensive content removed and “refine our [ad] targeting terms in case
any further pages like these are created”.
The backlash “feels like a watershed moment for
Facebook”, said Christian Purser, head of digital at ad agency M&C Saatchi.
“They do have to take responsibility for content if they are to continue
growing their advertising.”
Bob Wootton, at ISBA, which represents major advertisers
in the UK, said: “The reputational damage that appearing next to these
unfortunate placements can inflict can very quickly outstrip what is a tiny
media cost.”
He added that Facebook and other websites, which have
identified targeted advertising as a lucrative revenue source, need to come up
with a “technological solution” that does not “take advertising in any area
where there is a likely [reputational] risk”.
In the first three months of this year, Facebook
generated revenues of $1.46bn, a 38 per cent rise over the same period a year
ago, as it rolled out new tools allowing advertisers to target individual
users.
Facebook said on Tuesday that the vast majority of the
misogynistic content had been removed from its site. It is facing calls to
review how it polices the site’s pages.
Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, said
there were many more examples of similarly distasteful images that, despite
user complaints, had not been removed.
Facebook notes that with almost 100bn pages on its site,
identifying and removing offensive content can take time.
Last week almost 100 women’s organisations wrote an open
letter to Facebook to demand better policing . It also called on Facebook users
to complain to brands whose ads had appeared next to controversial content.
Separately, online ads for mobile operator Vodafone
inadvertently appeared next to a YouTube video in which al-Qaeda sympathisers
called for jihad. Vodafone said it had been unaware of the situation and was
“understandably concerned”.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013.
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