Unfortunate ad placement

February 4, 2008 at 17:08 · Filed under Comment

When robots are given the job of choosing advertisements, unfortunate placement is one of the risks.

On the right you can see one example, found on icWales.co.uk, a Trinity Mirror group website, that in the age of keyword based selection, things can sometimes go wrong and insensitive or inappropriate advertising can be displayed, something which would rarely happen in a newspaper or on television, where advertisements are placed manually by humans.

One way to counter this would be to use blacklists, as well as a keyword list. A list of words which, if found on the page, should prevent the advertisement from being served, instead, moving to the next in line. For most, this would be a very simple piece of code to implement and would do wonders for the credibility of the advertiser.

Google adwords already has this capability and would imagine that Yahoo!’s answer to the Google service, Yahoo SM (Search Marketing) would employ a similar facility.
However, it seems that Trinity Mirror control their own advertising using scripts and pulling banners from DoubleClick. Perhaps this is a feature they should look at building into their back-end?

Uh Oh Facebook

December 11, 2007 at 12:36 · Filed under Technology

Just when we thought that Facebook could not put a foot wrong, rather like Google of the first five years, they overstepped the mark with Beacon and now James over at The Laboratorium has come up with interesting reasoning to condemn Facebook and Blockbuster for breaking the law by collecting and distributing video rental information in an ‘opt-out’ scheme, incriminating stuff. And if the sums of Mark from Mashable are anything to go by, the two companies could be in some substantial trouble if the any number of people decide to start class action lawsuits.