Programmatic advertising can cause major problems and Jaguar Land Rover and Mercedes were alerted to their brand ads being shown in the same place as terrorist videos. Honda and Nissan car ads also appeared next to material relating to extremist political groups, without their knowledge.

This is a challenge with programmatic as no terrorist or extreme movement will use the labels and tags to correctly attribute the content of their work. This means that the only way that companies can ensure their brand videos are shown in the right places is to verify all locations, which is nearly impossible. There were different reactions to the findings and all companies were shocked and stated that they had not authorised the positioning. The challenge is that with 300 hours of video uploaded to popular sites like YouTube daily, this is difficult to monitor.

Jaguar Land Rover simply stopped its campaign and removed all its digital ads, whilst Mercedes asked its agency to review the situation and updated its blocklist (Dron, 2017).

Questions

Imagine you are working for a well-known brand and your ads appear next to undesirable videos, without your knowledge. You find out when a journalist makes contact to ask why your brand is supporting terrorists or extremists:

• What is your reaction?

• How could you explain this to the senior management team?

• How could you ensure it did not happen again?