Oct 30 (Portal) – Maria Julia Assis was eating in her north London terraced house when her pale-faced 6-year-old son ran into the dining room.
The puzzle game on his Android phone was interrupted by a video showing Hamas fighters, frightened Israeli families and blurry footage. On a black screen, the first-grader was told a message from the Israeli Foreign Ministry: “We will ensure that those who harm us pay a heavy price.”
Assis, a 28-year-old barista from Brazil, said the ad shocked her son and she quickly deleted the game.
“He was shocked,” she said in a telephone interview last week. “He literally said, ‘What are these damn ads doing in my game?'”
Portal was unable to determine how the advert came about for her son’s video game, but her family is not alone. The news agency documented at least five other cases across Europe in which the same pro-Israel video, which included footage of rocket attacks, a fire explosion and masked gunmen, was shown to players, including several children.
In at least one case, the ads were played within the popular game “Angry Birds” from SEGA-owned developer Rovio (ROVIO.HE).
Rovio confirmed that “for some reason, these ads with disturbing content entered our game by mistake” and are now being blocked manually. Spokeswoman Lotta Backlund did not provide any information about which of her “around a dozen advertising partners” provided her with the ad.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry digital director David Saranga confirmed that the video was a government-sponsored advertisement, but said he had “no idea” how it ended up in various games.
He said the footage was part of a larger campaign by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, which has spent $1.5 million on internet advertising since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on civilians in southern Israel that sparked the war in Gaza. He said officials had specifically instructed advertisers to “block it from anyone under 18.”
Saranga defended the graphic nature of the advertising campaign.
“We want the world to understand what happened here in Israel,” he said. “It’s a massacre.”
Portal contacted 43 advertising companies that Rovio listed as “third-party data partners” on its website to find out who placed the ads in the games.
Of those partners, 12, including Amazon (AMZN.O), Index Exchange and Pinterest (PINS.N), responded and said they were not responsible for displaying the ad on Angry Birds.
Saranga said the ministry had spent money on advertising companies including Taboola (TBLA.O), Outbrain (OB.O), Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google and X, formerly known as Twitter. Taboola and Outbrain said they had nothing to do with the gaming advertising.
Google has run more than 90 ads for the State Department, but declined to comment on where those ads were placed. X, formerly known as Twitter, did not respond to requests for comment.
Portal found no evidence of a similar Palestinian digital advertising effort, aside from some Arabic-language videos promoted by West Bank-based Palestine TV, a news agency affiliated with the Palestinian Authority.
A Palestinian Authority Foreign Ministry official said in a statement that the ministry was working to influence public opinion by sharing evidence of Gaza’s suffering under Israeli bombardment after the Oct. 7 attack, but did not say whether it used advertising as an advertising tool.
Representatives of Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules Gaza, did not respond to Portal requests for comment on its media campaigns.
Portal documented six cases – in Britain, France, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands – where people had seen the same or similar ads as Assis’ son, or said their children had seen them. In the Assis family’s case, the ads appeared in a game called “Alice’s Mergeland,” created by a developer called LazyDog Game. Additional ads appeared on family-friendly digital pastimes such as block-building game Stack, puzzle game Balls’n Ropes, Solitaire: Card Game 2023 and run-and-jump adventure Subway Surfers.
Alexandra Marginean, a 24-year-old intern from Munich, said she was surprised when the pro-Israel video appeared in the middle of her game of solitaire.
“I responded very aggressively to it,” Marginean said.
LazyDog Game did not respond to requests for comment. Stack’s Ubisoft-owned (UBIP.PA) developer Ketchapp, Solitaire’s Austrian developer nerByte, Balls’n Ropes’ Turkish developer Rollic and Subway Surfers’ Danish developer SYBO Games also did not respond to messages seeking comment on the ads.
Apple (AAPL.O) and Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google, which oversee the apps on their in-house software platforms for iPhones and Android phones, respectively, referred questions back to the games’ developers.
Advertising rules vary from country to country, but in the UK – where Assis and her son live – it is the Advertising Standards Authority that oversees advertising campaigns. The agency said that while it is not currently investigating Israeli government advertisements, in general, any advertising containing graphic images should be “carefully kept away from those under 18 years of age.”
(This story has been corrected to change the last name to Assis, not Cassis, throughout the copy.)
Reporting by Raphael Satter in Washington, Sheila Dang and Katie Paul in New York; Editing by Ken Li and Lisa Shumaker
Our standards: The Thomson Portal Trust Principles.
Acquire license rights, opens new tab