French advertising giant pulls out of Google and YouTube!

Havas becomes first major global marketing company to pull entire ad spend after talks with tech company break down.

 Google has been summoned to the Cabinet Office over adverts from several big organisations appearing next to inappropriate material. Photograph: Virginia Mayo/AP

A French advertising group that has clients including O2, EDF and Royal Mail has become the first of the major global marketing companies to pull all its ad spend from Google and YouTube.

Havas, the world’s sixth largest marketing services group, spends about £175m on digital advertising on behalf of clients in the UK annually.

The firm said it had taken the step after talks with Google had broken down because the tech company had been “unable to provide specific reassurances, policy and guarantees that their video or display content is classified either quickly enough or with the correct filters”.

It comes after Google was forced to review its ad policies when the UK government joined a number of organisations, including the Guardian, BBC and Transport for London, in pulling advertising from Google and YouTube. Google has been summoned to the Cabinet Office.Havas UK spends about £500m on all forms of advertising a year and has clients including Dominos, Emirates and the BBC. It said that the black list applies to all YouTube and digital display advertising on Google’s network.“We have a duty of care to our clients in the UK marketplace to position their brands in the right context where we can be assured that that environment is safe, regulated to the degree necessary and additive to their brands’ objectives,” said Paul Frampton, Havas UK chief executive and country manager.

“Our position will remain until we are confident in the YouTube platform and Google Display Network’s ability to deliver the standards we and our clients expect.”

Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of the world’s largest marketing services group WPP, was critical of Google but fell short of blacklisting the company from its UK advertising schedule.

“We have always said Google, Facebook and others are media companies and have the same responsibilities as any other media company,” said Sorrell. “They cannot masquerade as technology companies, particularly when they place advertisements.”

In a growing crisis for the tech giant, members of the Commons’ home affairs select committee wrote to Google to express disappointment that the government and major brands were still being placed alongside “inappropriate” content.

In its letter, the committee, chaired by Yvette Cooper, demanded that Google refund organisations whose adverts appeared linked to “offensive” videos.

Ronan Harris, managing director of Google UK, said: “We’ve begun a thorough review of our ads policies and brand controls, and we will be making changes in the coming weeks to give brands more control over where their ads appear across YouTube and the Google Display Network.”

Harris said last year Google removed nearly 2bn “bad ads” from its systems, removed over 100,000 publishers from its AdSense programme and prevented ads from serving on over 300m YouTube videos.

The inappropriate content included YouTube videos of American white nationalists, a hate preacher banned in the UK and a controversial Islamist preacher.

Ads for the Guardian’s membership scheme are understood to have been placed alongside a range of extremist material after an agency acting on the media group’s behalf used Google’s AdX ad exchange, which uses programmatic trading.

The use of programmatic trading, which automates the process of buying and selling advertising online, is increasingly controversial, raising concerns that it both hurts media revenues and supports extremist material.

Media owners such as YouTube and many thousands of other publishers make their advertising slots available within the programmatic system for advertisers to bid on. This process is handled through digital trading desks used by media agencies, which plan, book and execute campaigns on behalf of their advertising clients.

These connect with exchanges such as AdX, which is owned by Google, to in turn run ads around media such as videos on YouTube. Google also delivers ads to many other third-party sites.

An investigation by the Times claimed that as well as taxpayer-funded ads from the government, ads from several media and retail companies including Channel 4, the BBC, Argos and L’Oréal also appeared alongside extremist content on Google and YouTube.

A government spokeswoman said: “Digital advertising is a cost-effective way for the government to engage millions of people in vital campaigns such as military recruitment and blood donation.

“Google is responsible for ensuring the high standards applied to government advertising are adhered to and that adverts do not appear alongside inappropriate content. We have placed a temporary restriction on our YouTube advertising pending reassurances from Google that government messages can be delivered in a safe and appropriate way.

“Google has been summoned for discussions at the Cabinet Office to explain how it will deliver the high quality of service government demands on behalf of the taxpayer.”

Phil Smith, director general of Isba, which has some 450 members, called for changes to Google’s advertising policies.

“More needs to be done now to protect the reputation of responsible advertisers on digital platforms,” he said. “Isba urges Google immediately to review its policies and controls on the placement of advertising and to raise the bar to eliminate the risk of brands being damaged by inappropriate context.

“Whatever Google’s editorial policy, advertising should only be sold against content that is safe for brands. Isba would further encourage Google to withdraw immediately from sale any advertising inventory which it cannot guarantee as a safe environment for advertising, to restore advertiser confidence and to allow a thorough review of systems, processes and controls to take place.”

Isba suggested that Google should review placing ads immediately against newly uploaded YouTube content before it has been classified. “Google should ensure that content is quarantined until properly categorised,” Smith said.

Dan Brooke, Channel 4’s chief marketing and communications officer, said the company was extremely concerned about its advertising being put alongside offensive material on YouTube. 

“It is a direct contravention of assurances our media-buying agency had received on our behalf from YouTube,” he added. “As we are not satisfied that YouTube is currently a safe environment, we have removed all Channel 4 advertising from the platform with immediate effect.”

David Pemsel, the Guardian’s chief executive, wrote to Google to say it was unacceptable for its advertising to be misused in this way and the media group would be withdrawing its advertising until Google could “provide guarantees that this ad misplacement via Google and YouTube will not happen in the future”.

In a week which saw increasing political pressure on tech firms, representatives from Google, Twitter and Facebook were hauled in front of department of Culture, Media and Sport on Tuesday morning.

In a meeting at the department, they faced hard questions from Matt Hancock, the minister for digital and culture policy, over claims that they were not doing enough to curb the spread of fake news. The DCMS select committee is currently investigating the matter.

In the afternoon they then faced a further battering from the home affairs select committee, which accused them of “commercial prostitution” for failing to stem a flood of hate speech and extremist propaganda on their platform.

In a letter to Google, the committee also expressed shock that videos by banned far-right group National Action still appeared online despite heated exchanges between MPs and tech companies earlier this week.

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