Ads Gone Bad

Is this contextually targeted based on alternative spellings of “Cox”?

Someone will be fired for this one. I’m guessing its the junior copywriter that pulled a fast one on his boss, but not on the ever-peering eyes of Twitterville.

From the Spirit Airlines homepage:

Spotted on ScribeMedia.org:

Either David Wadler, CEO of Twistage, has a sexy little secret, or Blip.TV needs to work on their contextual targeting. This should have been an easy, B2B layup for a contextual overlay. Doesn’t anyone want to reach the online video B2B market?

Here’s the whole interview….

Does Lysol know that they’ve got auto-play, audio on video ads with no mute or pause button on a site that publishes a list of cracked, patched and otherwise copyright protected software? Does Adotube know they are serving it?

Oddly, the inventory is alledgedly protected by Mpire, whose website claims that their technology offers “Publisher accountability ensures advertisers’ messages are being delivered to the right sites.” I’m not sure this is the type of inventory - or ad experience - their advertisers have in mind. Maybe Lysol will switch to using DoubleVerify? This raises the question - Who is checking all of the inventory that the verification / authentication / brand protection software claim to protect? Surely Mpire isn’t the only with a few ads gone bad.

But whats with the :30 pre-roll for Pantene? C’mon. I’m a guy. That uses Rogaine.

Wow. These guys can’t catch a break.

Screen shot courtesy of Jai Decker, CEO, DrivenTide

Bad contextual match here. But who has a fear of ducks anyway?

Another example of piss poor ad exchange management? A typo calling an old ad? Just plain stupidity? Could be any of those reasons - or plenty more - for this ad showing up on a page.

I’d go see Jo Dee Messina at the Atlantis, but, uh, this ad is for an event that happened A MONTH AGO!

Today: December 22, 2009.
Event: Thanksgiving Weekend.

Fine, its more of a glitch than an honest to goodness mess, but i coudln’t resist the pun.

While checking my Yahoo mail, this banner ad expanded - not sure if I rolled over it or not - but I had no way to close it. Looks like some sort of DHTML error, since the search bar appears over the ad unit and not under it. Either way, you be the judge.

OK, so maybe it was too soon for Hudson River Plane jokes, but Virgin Airlines didn’t need to file a lawsuit over it.

Our good friends at industry blog (and side-splittingly funny and sarcastic) Adrants are on the wrong end of a legal assault for posting a fake ad (cached page), mocking the big red airline for taking advantage of the news cycle.

Good think that satire is protected under the free speech part of our constitution. And, Hey Mr. Branson, lighten up, dude.