It has been reported today that Facebook lost 6 big brand UK advertisers due to a lack of controls in their ad targeting. The main complaint of these advertisers was that their ads were being displayed on the group page for the British National Party, a right wing, anti immigration, anti Europe political party. Yesterday, it was reported that Vodafone and First Direct had pulled their advertising, but that Virgin Media, Halifax, Prudential, and the AA (Automobile Association) still had ads displaying. Today, all 4 of those companies pulled their ads. Virgin even went as far as to pull all advertising from all social media sites.

It looks like Facebook needs to implement a better way of targeting ads, so that companies can be ensured that their ads don’t display in locations that are against the goals or beliefs of the company. According to the article, Facebook hasn’t yet commented on this story, but given that they’re apparently charging $300,000 for a 3 month placement, you’d think that this issue would have moved up the priority ladder over the last 24 hours…

<update> If you go to the BNP group page (which I’m not even going to no-follow link to), you’ll see that there are now no ads displayed on that page.  However, there are other BNP groups out there that still have ads displaying, maybe Facebook will clean those up too…