Companies like AT&T and Johnson & Johnson said they would pull their ads from YouTube, as well as Google’s<br />display advertising business, until they could get assurances that such placement would not happen again.<br />With more than a billion videos on YouTube, 400 hours of new content being uploaded every minute<br />and three million ad-supported channels on the platform, Mr. Schindler said it was impossible to guarantee that Google could eradicate the problem completely.<br />But the issue has gained urgency in recent weeks, as The Times of London and other outlets have written about brands<br />that inadvertently fund extremists through automated advertising — a byproduct of a system in which YouTube shares a portion of ad sales with the creators of the content those ads appear against.<br />Google said it had already flagged five times as many videos as inappropriate for advertising,<br />although it declined to provide absolute numbers on how many videos that entailed.<br />As other brands started fleeing YouTube, Unilever discovered three instances in which its brands appeared on objectionable YouTube channels.<br />But Keith Weed, chief marketing officer of Unilever, decided not to withdraw its ads<br />because the number of ads appearing with objectionable content was proportionally small.<br />Now teaching computers to understand what humans can readily grasp may be the key to calming fears among big-spending advertisers<br />that their ads have been appearing alongside videos from extremist groups and other offensive messages.
