The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

And Jonathan. Well I want Jonathan to step away from the computer and do something completely different. COMPLETELY different.

And for the sake of my friends and colleagues pensions, I guess it would be wise for me to say this is just a little tease and in no way something I am claiming is a designated business strategy for Google.

All done?

No.

OK … how about also adding these things can happen to the best of us and there’s been lots of occasions where inadvertent fuck ups have occurred by sheer bad luck.

Or lack of attention to detail.

Like the time a media planner sponsored the Sunday night movie for Johnson & Johnson tampons … only to find he had inadvertently spent a shitload of the clients cash happily announcing an association with RAMBO: First Blood.

Or the time the Telstra agency ran full page ads saying people could download the song of the Australian Idol winner – only to realise the URL didn’t have the .au suffix, which meant millions of tiny and impressionable kids got sent to a US gay porn stars site of the same name.

Better?

Oh fuck it, it’ll have to do.

Right … imagine you’re a high end fashion retailer, a high end fashion retailer who carefully manages every element of the brand perception.

You spend an absolute fortune making sure you seen in the right places and with the right associations.

So guess how happy you must be when Google serve this ad next to an article about one of your over-priced, over-hyped new lines …

If you can’t see what it is, on the left is an article in SMH.com about a new LV belt, and on the right is an ad for the new line of fakes available from some dodgy Asian shop.

On one hand its inspired ad placement for the pirates, on the other, it’s unlikely LV will regard Google as best buddies.

How did it happen?

Well apparently it has something to do with how Google handle none- AU IP addresses, but for me, the bigger issue is that Google took money off a company that sells pirated goods – stop that and that would go a long way to avoiding this sort of thing.

Mind you, with the amount of money being made on pirated products these days, maybe it’s Google demonstrating their fierce brain again and recognising that in the future, they’ll be more money advertising fakes for companies than the real thing from the brand ‘owners’.

As I said, there are occasions where this thing can happen by pure bad luck … like the time KFC launched the Big Apple Crumble and Towering Inferno burger on September 11th 2001 … but I have to say in this instance, I think it’s due to both a questionable conduct by someone at Google sales AND a momentary lack of foresight when creating the systems that decides where ads should appear.