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Pesach Lattin is the CEO at Vizi Media. He is often credit as the inventor of the Advertising Pop-Up, although he doesn't often mention that in mixed company.

He has assisted many companies in strategic interactive advertising campaigns and revenue generation, from ABOUT.com to SonyStation. He is one of the creators of SPRINKS which became the Google AdSense network.

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Major AdNetworks on “Questionable Sites” Part III

Written on
May 4th 2006
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by Pesach Lattin  |
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Everyone asks me what I am doing on these sites in the first place. To answer you, I’m often tracking down my network’s wayward advertising that ends up in the darndest places–despite our strict policy against our advertising appearing on adult material. It seems that our high CPMs make some of the less truthful individuals sign up for our network and then broker them out to other networks. Who knew?

You’d think after all the discussion in the various industry circles about product placement, and the article Julia Angwin of the WSJ wrote about Verizon banner-ads showing up on semi-pornographic sites, that the wireless provider would be a little more careful about their placement. After one of my first articles about placement of ads in curious places, many of the major networks stopped booking advertising on these sites — but as soon as they agencies stopped looking, it seems some of the same people were up to the same tricks before. There is just too much money to ignore for these networks, so some of them are always seeking easy ways and placements to put high-CPM branded advertisers.

Verizon seems to be one of the top brands that has a serious problem with protecting their brand placement. They have become the sponsor of both the “how big of a bottle can you deep-throat contest” and porngraphic cartoons by placing their ads at CollegeHumor.com .

Luckily for Verizon, they aren’t the only telephone company that enjoys sponsoring nudeor semi-nude photos of women. Sprint seems to be the place where you can use your phone to reach out and touch a drunk sorority girl thanks to their placements through a friendly, well-known network (I’m purposefully leaving out the name of the network). We know that this network is working diligently in preventing their advertising from showing their ads on pornographic sites but a little bit more work in the realm of actually looking at the sites could go a long way. Any site that has ads for SexSearch and AdultFriendFinder, might be a clue that it shouldn’t be a part of your network.

Of course, the funniest advertisement is the one at the bottom of the page for DishTV, which contains a kid fighting smut on TV. Of course, if your kid is visiting this site, maybe you need better family entertainment.

Anyways, has anything actually changed? Would love your comments on this topic, what you think can be done and what are the first steps needed to be taken to solve this problem. If you are curious to see the wide range of advertisers sponsoring topless drunk co-eds, feel free to at http://www.collegehumor.com/rrated/1686013/

I’m sure an hour or so after this is published, the networks will be taking their tags down, but you never know. It’s worth browsing to see if your brand is being abused by networks who just don’t “Get it.” Why do I care? Because my advertisers care about network quality and where their advertising is being published.



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Reader Comments.

This is very unfortunate.

Posted by Michael | 12:41 pm on May 4, 2006.

The reality of the situation is that the folks who are on these sites enjoy these sites, and the advertisers that are “mistakenly” there actually benefit from having their brand associated with sites that are deemed “cool”. This marketing “mistake” may be the best branding effort they are doing!

Posted by unknown | 12:41 pm on May 4, 2006.

I guess the assumption is, the people visiting these sites do not have the “extra” available income to purchase mobile phones, or they don’t watch TV (or maybe they only watch TV channels available via the antenna (ala 1975). And I also guess, that mobile phone (the ones with the little cameras) are not used to take any of these pictures available via these sites. Because it’s a well know fact, that college students don’t use mobile phone, camera phones, drink beer, have s - e - x - so advertising something like a mobile phone service (say Verizon or Sprint) would be the last thing you’d want coming up on your college-based web site (along with a Coors or Trojan ad).

First of all - pornography is ill-defined, second of all - get under about 40 years old and we fairly savvy about associating the advertiser and the medium. how about all those people that advertise on MTV (channels), they can be fairly raunchy and I don’t believe that just because SCION puts an ad on Bam’s show that they are advocating being a dumb a s s .

Posted by John Doe | 1:04 pm on May 4, 2006.

The question on this topic has always been whether or not advertisers want to be associated with these sites, and they do not! NEtworks are not monitoring their sites enough.

Posted by Bob | 1:06 pm on May 4, 2006.

In addition to Branding, there’s also the matter of demographic targeting. Whereas an advertiser may not desire being branded alongside an adult content web site, it may nontheless reach the desired demographics.

A good example would be a major credit issuer which just launched a ‘virtual, anonymous, debit card’ designed specifically for college students. Where would be the best places to reach that demographic? College students who want to make anonymous purchases online… hmm, maybe a large percentage frequent adult sites?

Naturally, each advertiser’s marketing terms and conditions must be followed. The best solution for marketing agencies is to offer their advertisers the option for adult marketing, and further break it down to ‘hard’ or ’soft’ adult sites.

Posted by David Hurlbert | 11:10 am on May 5, 2006.

Water pollution is the World’s biggest problem today

Posted by Anal Masturbation | 1:18 am on April 27, 2007.

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