Coss-Posted on Election Geek

The New York Times has an article by Saul Hansell looking into the use of online advertising networks and how campaigns are utilizing them with often undesired effect. The big example given is the appearance of Mitt Romney ads on Gay.com however it is a problem I've hardly seen limited to that one candidate or incident.

The issue boils down to this. Campaigns use services offered by Advertising.com, Adsense and other ad networks to get their message on Web sites. Keywords, especially in the case of Adsense, are used to decide where those ads are placed. Campaigns have the ability to remove themselves from some sites, to geo-target in specific areas and do a number of other things to ensure their message hits the right kind of people but it is the network which largely decides where best to place the ads.

The problem? These networks and the technology they run on are still being born and perfected. Because of this many of these systems, unless they have heavy watch by humans, ads often get places where they shouldn't be. Some ads might look to a computer like they fit some sites because of keywords used. Barack Obama ran into a similar problem as Romney earlier in the year with the keyword 'politics' and I see John McCain ads on sites everywhere and often in the last places political candidates would ever want to sponsor.

Because advertising supports Web sites the exchange can be seen as money spent "in support" of these spaces even though the network itself places the ad and not the campaign. Should this be the case?

On one hand a sane person wouldn't expect that an ad by a corporation placed in a newspaper is that corporations endorsement of every story or editorial that surrounds it. Likewise we could not assume that a newspaper endorses every product and business practice of a company simply because they run their ads. We don't always live in a sane world with sane people though.

In politics advertising is constantly used as a way to attack and subvert opposition. When radio and television hosts and personalities say something people don't like, the first thing opposition groups do is target sponsors. When groups run ads, the first thing opposition groups do is target the publisher.

Whether this is a logical or acceptable form of attack is almost never questioned. The decision to drop advertising or refuse an ad is a decision not made through the eyes of the law but through the court of public opinion and we have just accepted that advertising is in some way an endorsement of content.

Web sites and online ad campaigns are not immune. Add to the charged nature of political advertising and public opinion the fact that much of what we see on the Web is so outside of the mainstream and so profane in language, imagery and ideology. In this environment candidates run a risk of having their name and message associated with something they might find repugnant and could turn public opinion against them.

The problem for all the candidates is even though they hire a network to provide a service they cannot escape the perception it is the campaign itself which is approving every individual site for their ad. I suspect this won't be the last we see of misplaced online ads.