The Art of Being Less Guilty
The Wall Street Journal ran an article yesterday about a few storied advertisers who had been caught unaware when ads placed through network buys turned up near scantily clad young girls on Myspace and elsewhere.
One of said storied advertisers was Monster, who “didn’t realize its spot was on a site that appeared to be offering unauthorized downloads of copyrighted music and videos. Once they found out, all yanked their ads .”
The claim was legitimate enough. As it turned out their buy cascaded down into other networks and affiliates. “Monster.com, for instance, bought ad space from ValueClick Inc., the second-largest ad network in terms of reach. But ValueClick ended up placing some of Monster.com’s order through a smaller network called ASN, owned by privately-held Broadspring Inc. ASN then ran the ads on Web site emp3s.com, which appears to be offering free downloads of copyrighted music and movie clips. Emp3s.com, which is registered to a Korean address, didn’t respond to an email request for comment.”
Hold those crocodile tears back, however. Monster weren’t exactly duped completely, as Eliot Spitzer’s latest spyware lawsuit shows. This time Spitzer has decided to shame advertisers who use spyware by naming them but not indicting them. This from mediapost’s wrap of the case: “In court papers, Spitzer’s office also identified several large advertisers that had used Direct Revenue, including Priceline, Cingular, Monster.com, JPMorgan Chase, and United Airlines. (Spitzer did not allege that those companies violated any laws.)” It is not clear whether large advertisers refers to the amount each spends in total on advertising or with Direct Revenue. (Side tangent: Direct Revenue has done a lot to clean up its act in recent times, which is why it is strange to see the lawsuit come about, but I guess what happened in the past still warrants consequence).
So the conclusion from Monster’s media buying decision makers was that spyware advertising is OK but being shown on dubious network sites (and agreed, illegal music sites are legitmately illegitimate) is not. The art of being less guilty.
