Several major Canadian brands are dealing with the fallout of a CBC news story investigating how ads for big-name companies appeared next to questionable content on a teen chat site.
According to a news story on CBC’s website, several major advertisers have pulled their ads from Stickam, a video chat site for youth 14 and up.
CBC’s interaction with the site revealed teens and young people engaging in sexually explicit behaviour and bullying. It also revealed that the site has been previously implicated in lawsuits alleging that sexual assault and “sextortion” took place on Stickam’s service.
The story makes note of several banner and pre-roll ads for major Canadian corporations, including Tim Hortons, Home Depot, Bank of Montreal and Rogers, appearing around questionable content. (Rogers also owns Marketing magazine.)
The story also notes that “ads shown on Stickam are often placed en masse—on several websites—by Google Adsense and other web ad placement services. Advertisers or their agencies state their price and target market—in a real-time “auction”—and the placement services put their ads on sites that meet the bids. When contacted by CBC News, Rogers, Home Depot and BMO all said they didn’t realize their ads were on the Stickam site.”
The story also includes responses from each of the mentioned companies:
“We’d like to confirm the site in question was not identified as part of the list that was provided to us when we placed our online advertising. We have removed our advertising from this site,” said Rogers spokesperson Carly Suppa.
“We have sites with inappropriate content blocked through our online ad exchange, and we are following up on this,” said Paul Berto from Home Depot. “That site is not where our customer is.”
BMO said it uses an online ad placement service called DataXu, which placed the ads in a real-time online auction.
“We will certainly have that conversation with these companies about how we undertake even more robust filters,” said spokesperson Ralph Marranca.
“In the meantime, we’ve taken Stickam off our advertising list. Moving forward, we are going to review the level of monitoring put in place by any user-generated site to ensure that their filters meet our criteria.”
As a result of our inquiries, those three companies and Tim Hortons all said they pulled their ads from the site.
“When you brought this to our attention today, we investigated, and found Stickam wasn’t an appropriate site for our ads. We immediately asked our advertising agency to pull our ads. We want to thank CBC for bringing it to our attention,” said Tim Hortons spokesperson David Morelli.
According to CBC reporter Kathy Tomlinson, Google has also de-listed Stickam from its AdSense service.
