Study finds the worlds' biggest brands, including Samsung and L'Oreal, are unknowingly running ads inside climate misinformation videos on YouTube
Avaaz says firms are unaware commercials being played alongside misleading videos — Some of the biggest companies in the world …
Context & Ripple Effects
Avaaz's finding is a repeat of a pattern YouTube has already been caught in once: a 2018 investigation found ads from 300+ organizations running on extremist channels even though many advertisers believed YouTube's sensitive-subject exclusion filter was protecting them. The 2020 study extends the failure to climate content, catching household names like Samsung and L'Oreal funding misinformation they never chose to back.
The arc since then shows the fix didn't hold: in 2023 CCDH found ads from major brands still running on climate-denial videos despite Google's 2021 demonetization pledge, and advertisers were separately demanding refunds over ads hidden in YouTube's TrueView system. Avaaz had already documented the same monetization dynamic on Facebook, where health-misinformation sites drew hundreds of millions of views.
First-order effects
- Samsung and L'Oreal are directly exposed: their ad budgets are financing climate misinformation videos without their knowledge, creating brand-safety and reputational risk they did not sign up for.
- YouTube's automated ad placement and its exclusion filters are shown failing again for climate content, putting Google's brand-safety promises back in question with its largest advertisers.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers can be expected to demand stronger verification, exclusions, and compensation — a push that materialized later when brands sought significant refunds over hidden TrueView ads.
- Google's demonetization commitments come under pressure to be independently audited rather than self-attested, since CCDH's later research found the 2021 climate-denial pledge was not being enforced.
Third-order effects
- If automated placement keeps funding misinformation across YouTube, Facebook, X, and open-web ad platforms — as Avaaz, CCDH, NewsGuard, and the Global Disinformation Index studies each documented — brand safety shifts from a platform promise to a compliance problem, inviting advertiser coalitions and regulators to demand third-party verification of where ad money lands.
- The recurring gap between platform pledges and measured outcomes pushes large advertisers toward independent monitoring tools and, potentially, away from open automated exchanges, restructuring how programmatic budgets are allocated.
The trend: Automated ad placement is repeatedly funding misinformation despite platform demonetization pledges, turning brand safety from a marketing claim into an audited compliance requirement.