• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 18, 2025

Ads for major brands such as the National Football League, Pepsi and Sony have appeared on two sites flagged by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for hosting child sexual abuse material (CSAM), according to research.

Monitoring where ads serve on platforms has been a major challenge for advertisers looking to protect their brands.

After Adalytics released a report this month placing the blame on major platforms, DoubleVerify pushed out AI-driven technology intended to monitor content classification and measurement technology more closely.

A report released earlier this month by Adalytics placed the blame on Amazon, DoubleVerify, Google, and Integral Ad Science, among others, for allowing the ads to appear on ibb.co or imgbb.com.

The research was unintentional. While conducting research on how U.S. government ads were served to bots and crawlers, Adalytics -- which reported the content -- accidentally came across a historical, archived instance where a major advertiser’s digital ads were served to a URLScan.io bot that was crawling and archiving an ibb.co page. It appeared to display explicit imagery of a young child.

"Integral Ad Science (IAS) and DoubleVerify (DV) are two companies which provide advertisers with digital ad measurement and monitoring tools. The vendors also provide 'brand safety' products," the Adalytics report stated.

The report stated that source code of the FanDuel and NFL co-branded ad video ad code appears to include tags from DoubleVerify.

Monitoring where ads serve on platforms has been a major struggle for advertisers looking to protect their brands while ensuring performance from ad spend.

An extension to DoubleVerify's content classification and measurement technology released Tuesday aims to help advertisers monitor performance and avoid content they deem unsuitable before their ads serve on Facebook and Instagram.

The release offers seamless alignment of content-level controls with post-bid measurement to improve campaign suitability rates, reduce media waste, and enhance ad performance on Meta’s Facebook and in Instagram Feed and Reels campaigns.

It also automates hourly refresh rates of content-level avoidance that requires no manual intervention, and provides an independent, third-party monitoring and protection service for ad placements.

The capabilities were built on DoubleVerify’s AI technology, which can analyze video, image, audio, speech and text to classify and avoid content before ads are served.

For video on Reels, for example, it extracts important scenes in the video to analyze it. DoubleVerify pointed to the volume and velocity of content on Facebook and Instagram as one reason why the company released this type of tool. 

The launch builds on last year’s release of post-bid brand safety and suitability measurement on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram Feeds and Reels.