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AP
An advertising boycott of YouTube is broadening, a sign that big-spending companies doubt Google’s ability to prevent marketing campaigns from appearing alongside repugnant videos.
PepsiCo, Wal-Mart Stores and Starbucks confirmed
that they have also suspended their advertising on YouTube after the Wall Street Journal found Google’s automated programs placed their brands on five videos
containing racist content. AT&T, Verizon, Johnson & Johnson, Volkswagen and several other companies pulled ads earlier this week.
The defections are continuing even after Google apologized for tainting brands and outlined steps to ensure ads don’t appear alongside unsavory videos. It’s not an easy problem to fix, even for a company with the brainpower that Google has drawn upon to build a search engine that billions trust to find the information they want in a matter of seconds.
Google depends mostly on automated programs to place ads in YouTube videos because the job is too much for humans to handle on their own. About 400 hours of video is now posted on YouTube each minute.
The company has pledged to hire more people to review videos and develop even more sophisticated programs to teach its computers to figure out which clips would be considered to be too despicable for advertising.
Google stood by its earlier promise, signaling the
company’s confidence that it will be able to placate advertisers. As part of that effort, Google intends to block more objectionable videos from ever being posted on YouTube — an effort that could spur complaints about censorship. Some outraged advertisers are making it clear that they won’t return to YouTube until they are certain Google has the situation under control.