More On Advertising from Talking Points Memo...
Doug Smith wrote yesterday after I posted news about Philly.com's porn ad to let me know about an interesting discussion over at liberal blog site Talking Points Memo.
The site uses automated ad placements, and recently they've been offering banner ads for Ann Coulter and John McCain. Here's what Josh Marshall had to say about it:
Recently there've been a lot of John McCain ads and another ad for some daily email from Ann Coulter. Now, as it happens, these two ads are, I think, coming through the Google ad network. So we don't have any contact with the advertiser. We sign on to the Google Adsense service and the ads just appear. We see them the first time when you do. But that doesn't change the real issue. We could stop them from running if we wanted to. But we don't.
These ads have prompted a lot of emails, ranging from bemusement to curiosity to outrage (with a decided lean toward the end of the list.)
Marshall has an interesting take on why he doesn't yank Google Adsense from TPM:
The first and most important reason is that the policy is critical to preserving the editorial integrity of our product, which is news and information. Precisely because we are in the news and opinion business, advertising tied to ideas, issues or advocacy presents us with a particular challenge. If we reject ads that we disagree with, every ad we accept becomes, to one degree or another, a de facto endorsement. And that's a de facto endorsement that is tied to money we're paid to run the advertising. In other words, if we run ads only from candidates or causes we support, then the ad relationship also becomes an endorsement relationship. Even worse a paid endorsement. And that threatens the integrity of what we do -- which is to report the facts we find and explain the opinions we have.
I hadn't considered that by rejecting certain ads, it may be perceived that the ads running are actually endorsed by the carrier. In Marshall's case, we're mainly talking about politics, which has a fairly clear division and specific content area. (See TPM's official ad policy here.)
Since I wrote about the porn ad yesterday, I've been chatting (via email) with Kevin Donahue, Executive Producer at philly.com. If you didn't see it in the comments section, here's what Kevin said about the ad:
We pulled down the ad you referenced in your blog post Wednesday afternoon. Thanks for the heads-up on this. This particular ad campaign was first created and approved several years ago, with an explicit prohibition that it link to the bar's site. At the time, the link took you to a neutral domain - a domain we controlled - with the printable coupon. The ad has run exclusively on Sports section pages and it has never included a link to the bar's Web site, which we all agree is inappropriate as a link from Philly.com.
Obviously, at some time, the creative changed and someone missed that distinction regarding the domain at which the coupon should reside. It was likely someone not involved in the original discussion OK'ing some creative that appeared little changed from the former.
Our linking to the bar's site, even without an explicit link to the adult content on other sections of the domain, was certainly a mistake that we have now rectified. Like I said, thanks for the notice of this.
I'm wondering how folks are navigating this slippery ground, especially now that alternative content delivery services (WAP, mobile-to-web, Podcasts, etc.) are being deployed. Does anyone have an example (white paper, internal memo) for best practices?
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