An Israeli government ad featuring graphic footage of the Gaza conflict has reportedly appeared in mobile games such as Angry Birds.

 

A Reuters investigation found six cases of ads containing videos of missile attacks and explosions appearing in mobile games in the UK, France, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands.

The ad has reportedly appeared in games such as Rovio Angry Birds, Ketchapp Stack, Sybo Subway Surfers, LazyDog Game Alice’s Mergeland and Rollic Balls’n Ropes.

GamesIndustry.biz has reached out to the said developers for further clarification.

A Rovio spokesperson confirmed to Reuters that the ads were “mistakenly pushed” into Angry Birds and clarified that they are being manually blocked.

Reuters reports that Rovio “did not provide details on which of its ‘about a dozen ad partners’ supplied it with the ad.”

It is unclear which advertising company placed the content in Angry Birds. Reuters reached out to more than 40 companies listed by Rovio as “third-party data partners” and only 12 responded, including Amazon, Index Exchange and Pinterest, which said they were not responsible for the in-game appear.

David Saranga, head of digital affairs at Israel’s foreign ministry, told Reuters the ad was government-sponsored but had “no idea” how it got into mobile games. According to Saranga, officials have instructed advertisers to “block it for under 18s”.

He added that the ministry had paid for those ads to run through ad companies such as Tabloola and Outbrain – which told Reuters they were not involved in video game advertising – as well as on internet platforms such as Google and X, previously called Twitter.

Google confirmed it ran more than 90 ads for the ministry, but declined to say where they appeared. X did not respond to inquiries from Reuters.

The UK’s advertising regulator said in a statement that while the matter was not currently being investigated, “extremely shocking” images and footage should be “carefully removed from under-18 audiences”.

Source: Gameindustry.biz