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The National Lottery, which is operated by Camelot, has been the first to pull its ads from the website after dozens of brands, including Motorola, Barclaycard, Hilton Hotels, Citroen, HP, Vauxhall and mobile operator 3, had ads appearing next to adult movie titles such as '20 Teens Who Love to Suck Cocks' and '1,001 Ways to Eat My Jizz'.

A spokesman for Camelot told Brand Republic: "We are in the process of instructing our internet media buying agency to have the ad removed from the [IMDb] site.

"We have a strict advertising promotion code, extending not only to our own advertising but also to all agencies that place advertising on our behalf and to media owners. Our priority at all times is to safeguard the reputation and integrity of The National Lottery."

Barclaycard has also pulled its advertising, and is now reviewing the situation and is in talks with IMDb.com. It is considering either putting its ads back on certain parts of IMDb that do not feature adult film listings, or the whole site.

A spokesman for Barclaycard said: "Barclaycard has been running banner adverts on the Internet Movie Database website run by Amazon.

"The site seeks to list all the movies which have ever been made, including adult ones, but by no stretch of the imagination could be described as a porn site.

"As company policy, we seek to advertise only on reputable websites and temporarily removed our adverts from this site while we carried out a full investigation and spoke to the website."

The news follows on from the Facebook advertising saga earlier this month, in which brands such as Vodafone were running on a page promoting the British National Party.

Facebook subsequently added a new blocking feature that allows advertisers to opt out of part of the site and avoid appearing next to listings for the estimated 6m user groups.

ISBA, the voice of British advertisers, backed the swift move by Facebook and said it hoped the action will become a "new standard in online brand protection which will become the benchmark to which other site owners will aspire".

The case of IMDb and Facebook suggest that many ads appearing online are not monitored by digital media planners and buyers in the same way as offline ads are.

It raises a concern that there is less quality control over the environments in which ads appear online, which is creating undesired associations between brands and the content their advertisements are displayed next too.

Brand Republic contacted IMDb, but it had not responded by the time of publication.