Less than a month after Procter and Gamble made a wary return to Google’s flagship video platform, technology giant Cisco citing brand safety concerns, has announced that it is pulling all of its advertisements from YouTube until further notice.
“Cisco has adopted the most rigorous industry standards to help ensure our online advertising does not accidentally end up in the wrong place, such as on a streaming video with sensitive content or a site that does not align with the values of our brand,” Cisco CMO Karen Walker stated in the announcement.
According to Cisco, YouTube does not meet those standards, which blamed such platforms for not updating their algorithms quickly enough to accommodate for changing “sensitive issues in the media.”
“We are working closely with all of our media partners to ensure that Cisco’s online advertising meets our stringent standards,” Walker added. “We only advertise where those standards are met and where we can ensure inappropriate content is not shared.”
For Cisco, which claims to have 62,000 advertising partners, enforcement of these aforementioned strict standards is of utmost importance in keeping its brand relevant. Despite its strong concerns, Cisco does not assert what exactly its standards are, or how exactly YouTube fails to meet them.
“At Cisco, we would rather not wait for something bad to happen,” Walker writes.
An earlier version of the announcement called out YouTube specifically, as it “did not meet our brand guidelines,” though Cisco revised the post and removed the line after a conversation with Google representatives, the Wall Street Journal reports.
“While Google and Facebook have made some strides to combat the issue, at this time we have pulled all online advertising from YouTube until the platform has met our standards,” the original post read.
This news comes during an identity crisis for YouTube, which is having difficulties weighing its responsibilities toward its advertisers and its commitment to taking care of its creators, who drive users to see its ads.
“We are committed to making sure that YouTube remains a vibrant community with strong systems to remove violative content and we look forward to providing you with more information on how those systems are performing and improving over time,” the company reassured its creators in a blog post last month.
