Keep your ads away from toxic content

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📝 Context

Topic: Ads | Social Media | Brand & Strategy
For: B2C
Research date: March 2025 
Universities: Dartmouth College, University of Oxford

A 2017 investigation by The Times newspaper found that hundreds of brands, from the supermarket chain Waitrose to Mercedes-Benz, had their ads appearing alongside content by ISIS sympathizers and white supremacists.

In response, large brands like Jaguar, Sandals Resorts and others announced an immediate suspension of their digital advertising until they gained better visibility on where all their programmatic ads were placed.

But does it truly matter to viewers? And how much?

Science says, the impact on customers may be even worse than initially thought.

P.S.: When you’re running your ads online, try to keep a frequency cap of 3 per user for the general public to make sure your ad stays effective and doesn’t annoy people.

📈 Recommendation

Make sure your online ads are not placed alongside content people might consider unsafe or objectionable (e.g. racist or violent content or content about smoking and drugs). If people see your ads next to this content, they will have more negative opinions of your brand, and trust you less.

If your ad does get shown next to unsafe or objectionable content, respond immediately with follow-up messages to highlight your disapproval of the objectionable content to minimize the negative impact.

🎓 Findings

• Online, when people see an ad next to content they think is unsafe or objectionable, they trust the advertising brand less and have more negative opinions of the brand.

• As part of a series of 6 experiments and an analysis of 6.7 million posts on X, researchers found that people had:

  • 18.8% worse opinions of AT&T and trusted the telecom company 17.8% less when their ad on X was placed alongside an anti-semitic post, compared to a benign post about Hanukkah.

  • 18.3% worse opinions of Nissan and Disney when they saw their Youtube ads placed next to content by ex-KKK leader David Duke.

    • People who heard about, but didn’t see the ads, also had 17.7% worse opinions of the brands

• The effect:

  • Reverses when a brand responds to the incident, (vs not issuing a response), with:

    • An immediate response leading to a 18.1% increase in trust for the brand

    • A response a little while after the incident leading to a 13.6% increase in trust

    • A response a week later leading to a 7.2% increase in trust

  • Disappears when the unsafe content fits the brand’s tone (e.g. an edgy brand appearing next to marijuana-related content).

  • Only works for unsafe or objectionable content (e.g. white supremacist content), not general negative content (e.g. discussion of maternal death rates).

🧠 Why it works

• When we see things next to one another, the two become linked in our minds.

• Accordingly, when we see an ad next to objectionable or unsafe content, our concerns with the content lead us to judge a brand appearing alongside it.

• Online, more so than in other mediums, trust plays an especially important role in whether we like a brand or buy from them.

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✋ Limitations

• The research looked at people’s self-reported trust in the brand. It hasn’t been tested whether this also impacted sales or revenues.

• The study focused on certain types of unsafe content (anti-semitism, racism and smoking). It’s unclear if the effect would carry over to other types of content (e.g. fringe politics or conspiracy theories).

• The research looked at reactions to ads on Facebook, Youtube and X. Users on other platforms (e.g. TikTok or Reddit) may respond differently.

👀 Real-life example

In 2017, ads for the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the Twin Waters Family Resort’s ads on YouTube were unwittingly placed alongside objectionable and unsafe content in Australia.

❌ Issue: Both brands’ ads appeared alongside content for a Russian militant group glorifying extremism.

✅ Solution: Both brands can minimize the chances of this happening and its impact, by:

• Ensuring their ad buys are restricted to Youtube channels vetted and approved by the brand, as compared to (cheaper) general audience and inventory buys.

• Focusing their advertising on channels part of the “Youtube Preferred” and “Google Preferred” whitelist, to minimize chances of objectionable content being included.

• Targeting their programmatic buying to keywords related to their product (e.g. “university”, “higher education” and “bachelors” for UNSW or “vacations” “family trips” and “waterparks” for Twin Waters), instead of targeting audiences regardless of the content.

• Rapidly apologizing for the ad placement and being transparent about the targeting criteria that led to the placement, to highlight it was an inadvertent mistake.

🔍 Study type

Online experiments and data analysis of 6.7 million posts on X.

📖 Research

Brands in unsafe places: effects of brand safety incidents on brand outcomes. Journal of Marketing Research. (June 2025).

🏫 Researchers

• Lauren Grewal. Dartmouth College

• Prasad Vana. University of Oxford

• Andrew Stephen. University of Oxford

Remember: This is a new scientific discovery. In the future it will probably be better understood and could even be proven wrong (that’s how science works). It may also not be generalizable to your situation. If it’s a risky change, always test it on a small scale before rolling it out widely.

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