Holden, Kia pull YouTube ads after Ita Buttrose abused on misogynistic men’s rights channel

CAR giants Holden and Kia are pulling all advertising from YouTube after unwittingly appearing alongside misogynistic content targeting Ita Buttrose.

An advertising boycott of YouTube is broadening. Picture: Richard Vogel/AP

CAR giants Holden and Kia are pulling all advertising from YouTube after unwittingly appearing alongside a video containing misogynistic abuse of journalist Ita Buttrose.

The video, ‘Australian Feminist Talk Show Laughs at Men’s Suffering’, featured an interview on Studio 10 with men’s rights activist Peter Lloyd, edited with insults towards the hosts including Buttrose, who was described as an “old hag” and a “granny”, among other expletives.

“Men’s rights activist and author Peter Lloyd gets ambushed by a feminist talk show, mangina, simps and white knights,” the video description reads.

Fairfax reported that Holden and Kia made the decision to immediately pull advertising from the site after being alerted to their ads appearing next to the videos, which were uploaded by a channel called MGTOW 101, or “Men Going Their Own Way”.

“We value our good relationship with Google but in line with General Motor’s global response and Holden’s diversity stance, we have instructed our media agency to temporarily suspend all advertising on YouTube until we are confident Google can protect our brand from inappropriate or offensive content,” a Holden spokesman told Fairfax.

“We’ll work closely with our partners at Google to achieve this.”

A Kia spokesman told the paper the carmaker had suspended its programmatic advertising after being alerted. “It will remain suspended until such time as we can meet with Google to further clarify the application of this type of advertising,” he said.

Ita Buttrose attacked by a men's rights YouTube channel. Picture: MGTOW 101/YouTube

YouTube, which was bought by Google in 2006 is facing a broadening of the advertising boycott, 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 on Friday 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 apologised for tainting brands and outlined steps to ensure ads don’t appear alongside unsavoury 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.

Contacted Friday, Google stood by its earlier promise, signalling 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.

“The content with which we are being associated is appalling and completely against our company values,” Wal-Mart said in a Friday statement. Besides suspending their spending on YouTube, Wal-Mart, PepsiCo and several other companies have said they will stop buying ads that Google places on more than two million other third-party websites.

If Google can’t lure back advertisers, it could result in a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Most analysts, though, doubt the ad boycott will seriously hurt Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet Inc.

Although they have been growing rapidly, YouTube’s ads still only represent a relatively small financial piece of Alphabet, whose revenue totalled $96.45 billion ($US73.5 billion) last year after subtracting commissions paid to Google’s partners. YouTube accounted for $7.35 billion ($US5.6 billion), or nearly 8 per cent, of that total, based on estimates from the research firm eMarketer Inc.

At most, RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney said he expects the YouTube ad boycott to trim Alphabet’s net revenue by about 2 per cent this year. Moody’s Investor Service predicted the backlash won’t last long because Google is “laser-focused” on cleaning things up on YouTube.

Alphabet’s stock price has fallen nearly 4 per cent since the boycott began last week after an investigation by The Times in London revealed the ads of major brands were appearing in YouTube videos delving into contentious themes. The shares fell $US4.51 to close at $US835.14 Friday.