LA Times reports on what they call "odd ad placement" whereby PepsiCo, Georgia-Pacific and State Farm pulled their advertising on Yahoo! when they found their ads running adjacent user generated chat rooms discussing child pornography/sex with kids.
The article inadvertently raises several key questions/comments:
1) Accurate or inaccurate match?: Was this a product of a flaw in the contextual/behavioral targeting methodology e.g. keyword "children"
2) (How) should portals/communal oriented publishers accept advertising in less controlled environments (huge Pandora's Box) - from blogs to "spaces"?
3) Is this being overblown and in the grander scheme of things, a one-off? Remember the example of a hard liquor brand (I think it could even have been ABSOLUT) that ended up sandwiched in a news article about a drunk driver who killed a pedestrian?
Make no mistake, it's completely unacceptable, but surely as the technology evolves, so too will these erroneous anomalies.
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