• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, June 27, 2005

In the wake of the disclosure that prominent marketers ran ads on one of Yahoo!'s user-created sexually explicit chat rooms, research and auditing company I/PRO will today unveil a new tool that evaluates ad activity on Web portals, to determine whether ads have appeared on any of the portals' potentially offensive pages.

The new tool, "BrandGuard Content Audit," will evaluate pages with dicey content--pornography, political extremism, gambling, spyware, and the like--and will report how many total ad impressions ran on such pages.

I/PRO CEO Allan Kaplan said the company is in talks with several potential clients, such as Web portals and networks.

Kaplan said I/PRO first started developing BrandGuard in January, when Kraft Foods Inc. pulled its search ads from Google after Kraft's ads placed on Google's AdSense network ended up on a white supremacist site.

Last week's revelations in The Wall Street Journal that Georgia-Pacific Corp., State Farm Insurance Co., PepsiCo. Inc., and Countrywide Financial Corp. removed at least some ads from Yahoo! spurred I/PRO to unveil its tool today, Kaplan said.

Last week, Yahoo! temporarily pulled the plug on user-created chat rooms, after a report by Houston TV station KPRC revealed rooms apparently created to facilitate child sex abuse. One room named "6 to 11 Years Old Girls Into Older Men" reportedly carried an ad for Georgia-Pacific's Brawny paper towels.