Owners lose control of their brands online

Many of you will have sat in the august presence of the "guardians of the brand". Typically agencies on a commission or retainer basis delivering a range of services to the brand owners.

Prior to the explosion of the web brand control was much simpler. Now we have the interesting situation of a very large number of brands, via their display advertising agencies, funding pirate content across a broad variety of genres. As the clients are generally unaware of where their ads turn up, simply that they have bought an audience cheaply, we have the prospect / reality of childrens brands appearing next to illegal adult content.

A major issue is that the biggest audiences tend to collect around premium pirate material so an entire ecosystem has built up to monetise this which includes premium brands and ad networks.

Given the technology that Google has in its locker perhaps they could be quicker out of the blocks to offer a solution - but maybe that would knock @40% or more from adwords revenues.