Ad tech pros slam brand-safety failures in wake of bombshell report

A bombshell report published by Adalytics on Friday has sparked a brand safety scandal in the ad tech community, spurring demands from industry professionals for greater transparency from key ad tech vendors.

The report found that players like Google and Amazon allegedly served ads on a website hosting child sexual abuse material. The news prompted lawmakers to send letters to major tech companies to express “profound” concern about the findings.

Google and Amazon did not return requests for comment.

Adalytics found that programmatic ads from many major advertisers ran on a free, ad-supported image-sharing site (imgbb.com) that does not require user registration, and which hosted explicit images of young children between 2021 and 2025. As of January 2025, Google AdX, Google Ad Manager and DV360 did not appear to be actively transacting ads on the site, the report confirmed.

The Current spoke with 12 digital marketing experts about the report’s implications for the ad tech marketplace. Some offered comments on the record, while others requested anonymity.

The report reveals why transparency is critical to a healthy supply chain, and calls into question the effectiveness of brand-safety verification platforms like DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science (IAS), some sources say.

“It is long-past due for the industry to take a long, hard look at its failed efforts to self-regulate,” says Arielle Garcia, COO of Check My Ads.

Transparency in programmatic

Adalytics found at least 80 advertisers whose ads had run on the site, likely without their knowledge, even though the site had hosted some explicit imagery of children since at least 2021. How did ads served by some of the biggest ad tech vendors slip past online safety advertising safeguards?

“Many ad tech vendors have inventory policies that prohibit ads from appearing adjacent to illegal or sexually explicit content,” says an Adalytics spokesperson. “However, many of the same vendors provide limited detail as to what their enforcement practices are relative to those policies. It is unclear as to what proactive enforcement they undertake, or what threat intelligence they share with other ad tech vendors.”

Many of the people we spoke with suggested that the problem comes down to misaligned financial incentives.

“Big Tech just wants to sell more ads at more places,” says Jeromy Sonne, founder of Daypart.ai.

If there’s inertia within the ad tech community, how should advertisers drive change? The answer, according to several sources, is more transparency. And it’s time for advertisers to demand more data from their partners.

“The incentives are not aligned for change to occur,” says Jay Friedman, CEO of Goodway Group. “Brands are the source of the money. The brands who incentivize the right behavior from ad tech vendors can influence this change appropriately; otherwise the incentives are not aligned for change to occur.”

Adalytics noted that the ad tech vendors under scrutiny “do not provide the advertisers with page-URL-level reporting that would allow the brands to investigate exactly on what page URLs their ads [were] served.” In other words, advertisers often don’t know which specific webpages their ads are being served on, only the domain names.

“I’ve been in programmatic for 10 years and have seen how things change and grow,” says a veteran media buyer. “One thing that hasn’t is the availability of data to the average buyer.”

In response to the report, Adalytics tells The Current that “several Fortune 500 advertisers” have requested or intend to request that their ad tech vendors provide full URLs of where their ads are being served.

“I don’t think it’s acceptable for any advertiser to not know where their ads are running, period,” says Robert Leathern, founder of Trust2 Consulting and a former product exec at Google.

Several commentators emphasize that the findings are not an indictment of the programmatic industry as a whole.

“It’s not a problem with programmatic; it’s a problem with Big Tech’s incursion into the programmatic landscape,” says Adam Heimlich, CEO of Chalice Custom Algorithms.

Brand-safety concerns

The report also reveals gaps in brand-safety systems, according to sources who spoke with The Current. Adalytics, for instance, said it observed DoubleVerify and IAS “measuring or monitoring ads on various explicit pages” for major brands.

DoubleVerify and IAS did not return requests for comment.

“Brand-safety verification services aren’t protecting anything,” says an executive at a major brand. “They only allow the veneer of plausible deniability.”

That person says that IAS had labeled the site in question as "safe" for their brand.

“I understand there’s a lot of complexity and this site was taking measures to hide itself from Google Search, but these brand-safety partners advertise a foolproof product — and this isn’t foolproof,” says a programmatic executive at a media agency.

DoubleVerify said in a statement regarding the report that it “has taken immediate additional measures to block this site and affiliated sites for our customers” and is reviewing other ad-supported image-hosting sites that might be in its platform.

IAS also said it labeled the domains in the Adalytics report as “ineligible for monetization” and began a review of the sites in question.

DoubleVerify said that its customers accounted for “0.000047% of the total media transactions” on the site in the last 30 days. IAS added that, of the nearly 1.9 billion web pages it observed were eligible for ads in the last 60 days, 88,000 of them were from the domains named in the Adalytics report.

“I don’t care about that,” says the veteran media buyer, regarding the statements. “Are they doing what they say they can do, what we pay them to do? The answer seems to be ‘no.’”

Minimizing the findings just ignores the larger issues, one programmatic leader insists.

“Even just one impression is too much,” they say. “Part of fixing the problem is admitting there’s a problem.”

Pros call for change

If some ad tech players were able to avoid the website in question, then there are obvious ways for the industry as a whole to be more mindful of where ads are being placed, sources say — they just aren’t being enforced.

“Marketers should demand their URL-level data, audit their campaigns, and demand refunds from their agencies, verification partners, and ad tech vendors where their ad placements or services rendered did not meet the standards their suppliers committed to,” Check My Ads’ Garcia says.

But the big question people have is whether the industry can enforce its own standards, or if it will take government regulation. The letters sent by U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal to the ad tech vendors mentioned in the report show that Congress is already monitoring.

“There should be an industry standard that is actually met,” says an ad tech leader. “There needs to be basic standards and enforcement. The responsibility falls on everyone in the transaction.”

Some sources point to a lack of trade-group leadership for why the industry can’t rally behind a common cause for standardization. One person says there is a lack of “functioning trade groups.” Another was alarmed that none of them had released a statement on the Adalytics report by the time we spoke, three days after it had been released.

Ultimately, Garcia says, change will come down to three things: “Demand transparency. Create consequences. Fix the incentives.”