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Ad buyers are pointing the finger at Google, Amazon, and brand safety firms like Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify after a report from research firm Adalytics claimed that ads for top brands like Sony, Pepsi, and the NFL appeared on ibb.co or imgbb.com—sites that have been flagged by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children for hosting child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Google and Amazon don’t provide enough data
On Friday, Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) criticized Google and Amazon for obscuring ad placement data, preventing advertisers from seeing the exact URLs where their ads appeared on imgbb.com.
Neither company typically provides full URL-level reporting to advertisers, multiple sources told ADWEEK.
Instead, most ad buyers receive domain-level reports, which reveal the broader website but not the specific webpage—preventing them from knowing, for example, whether their ads appeared next to a reputable article or on a subpage with objectionable content.
Without access to exact URLs, senators said, advertisers can’t ensure their messages aren’t appearing next to illegal or policy-violating content.
Media executives at two different consumer brands whose ads appeared on ibb.co via Amazon’s demand-side-platform each confirmed to ADWEEK that Amazon provided them only with domain-level data about ad buys—and that multiple requests for URL-level data were not fulfilled.
ADWEEK reviewed a recent email sent to one exec in which an Amazon representative said that the company cannot provide full URL-level reporting.
A spokesperson for Amazon did not respond to a question from ADWEEK about whether URL-level data is available to advertisers.
A Google spokesperson, however, said: “Advertisers can access campaign reporting in the Google Ads UI about where their ads run. This may include site and URL-level reporting depending on the ad inventory and campaign type.”