Talk about poorly placed advertising!

[rabid1st]

Scroll down on this tragic story about what became of Titans player McNair...a married man having an affair with a 20 year old, obviously unstable woman.

http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ap-mcnairkilled&prov=ap&type=lgns

Look to the left midway down the page.

That's an offensive ad placement!

For those of you who don't see what I mean (maybe the browser is different or the ad changes...or, better yet, the advertising system gets a few complaints about how tasteless this is)...pop under this cut

The article tells of a 36 year old married man who was having an affair with a young woman. A woman who had a lot of financial problems. Suspecting that this man was cheating on her with ANOTHER young woman...the barely of age mistress cracked and shot McNair, and then herself.

Midway down the page, smack in the middle of this story, is a yahoo personals ad that reads...I kid you not...

"Seductive Search: Young Women Looking For Older Men."

:Headdesk:

There should be a disclaimer..."Older Men Strongly Cautioned Not To Respond!"

Comments

[phdelicious.livejournal.com]

I don't know if they changed it intentionally or not, but I get different ads when I load the page now.

That is pretty bad placement.

[larielromeniel.livejournal.com]

I saw different ads too...someone must have caught it.

This story just makes me shake my head. I'm really active in a moms community, and there are SO many young women who post for advice about the married men that they're fooling around with and sometimes even have kids with. It makes me want to reach through the screeen and shake them. HELLO! He's cheating on his WIFE! What the HELL makes you think he'll treat YOU any better?

[truwest.livejournal.com]

Well, the problem is that the existing technology can't handle all these situations effectively (yet).

Content on a big news site changes multiple times a day, often by the hour or even by the minute...meanwhile, ad space on the site is sold via an annual contract, and the ad content is often written weeks/months in advance. The site's systems then plug in Advertiser ABC's ad content in X places with Y frequency (based on the terms of the contract and thus what's been coded into the system).

Automated systems are driving all this, and it's very dynamic/ie pages changing constantly...it's not like old-fashioned newspapers where people are actually looking at every single page and seeing the full layout of a static unchanging page.

So yeah, unfortunately, you can end up with a mismatch between a specific news story and an ad that's sitting next to it. (And, in a high traffic site, yes you can get different impressions of the same page, so one visitor sees Ad A next to the story, and another visitor sees Ad B next to the same story...so sometimes you can see the story-ad combo, close your browser, go back, and see a different combo.)

Yeah, there's software that can do basic word-match searches between story content and ad content, in order to avoid the most embarrassing mismatches....but that kind of thing is notoriously difficult to get right (just ask the "nanny software" companies, who try to block adult sites and end up blocking a bunch of health care etc sites). There are some companies that specialize in linguistic algorithms (that help software better understand the complexities of human language), but there's still a lot of improvements needed in that area.

Long answer but hope it's helpful. (I work in Silicon Valley and have a passing acquaintance with these kinds of online media sites.)