Thursday, August 16, 2012

Advertising Abuse

All advertisers want to catch people's attention. Online advertisers have an even more difficult time getting people to notice their ads on busy web sites. They use all different kinds of fonts, colors, photos, and animation to get people to pay attention and hopefully, click on their ad. But sometimes advertisers go too far.

The other night I decided to check The Drudge Report before heading home. I was very shocked to see a the mug shot of James Holmes, the dirt bag who shot up the Batman Rises premier in Aurora. Some bone-headed advertiser decided using the photo of a murderer would be a nice way to get people's attention.


Now this horrible ad, while it appeared on The Drudge Report, it was not an ad created by Drudge. It is most likely part of an advertising service that The Drudge Report subscribes to and inserts a number of rotating ads in to the available ad slots placed by Drudge. Fortunately a quick email to the Drudge site and the ad disappeared.


And within a few minutes, new ads that rotated when the page was refreshed replaced the James Holmes image. After repeated page refreshing, the James Holmes ad did not appear. 


Big kudos to the Drudge Report for quickly taking down the offensive image. But that still leaves the problem of who created the ad and decided that using the picture of someone who recently killed a bunch of innocent people was a great idea. 

Unfortunately I was so focused on sending The Drudge Report an email so they could take the ad down I didn't click on the ad itself to see who was responsible. I am keeping my eye out for a reappearance so I can track down the creator. I would really like to ask them what the hell they were thinking.

If you have to resort to pictures of killers to get people to pay attention to your ad, you need to find a new ad designer or a new line of business. Offending and disgusting people usually isn't the best way to get new customers. Well, unless your target audience is a bunch of dirt bags. While I am not sure how lucrative the dirt bag demographic is, if that isn't your target market, you might not want to use murderers on your ad.