The headache for YouTube advertising seems to be getting worse with each passing day, and the Sydney Opera House is the latest to have prerolls pulled from the platform after the discovery that they were running before anti-feminist videos.
In the ongoing struggle to protect brands from conveying the wrong message, several advertisers have frozen their commercials from appearing on YouTube, with many of them unwittingly appearing before videos popular with paedophiles.
It has since been found that Sydney Opera House ads for its upcoming show The Choir Man have been found on an anti-feminist video that describe single mothers as “terrible”, and that working mums are “too busy at work to properly take care of their kids”.
The video, an apparent part of the “red pill movement” of men’s rights, had more than 700,000 views upon discovery.
Upon being contacted by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Google has since pulled advertisements from the video and the channel in question.
A Sydney Opera House spokeswoman told The Sydney Morning Herald that the company did: “not endorse the content in these videos and has taken immediate action to blacklist this channel and remove this content”.
Due to the fact that the business had already been following Google’s brand safety principles and implementing a blacklist of keywords and exclusions, this issue was one that they would be investigating further.
A Google spokeswoman spoke on the incident, saying: “As soon as we learned about this issue we worked quickly to remove ads from the channel”.
The video, which made such suggestions that women “can’t be a mother and career woman at the same time”, and that “only men could make decisions on their own”, had been on YouTube since 2017.
Multiple features have now been disabled on the video, such as comments, sharing, and suggested videos.
A duplicate of the video, uploaded by a different user in 2018, has also had comments disabled, however the channel’s other videos, containing similar content, is still accessible.
