The story so far: last week I found an ad I objected to on the website of a leading South African media group. The ad promoted a herbal concoction which, according to testimonials on the website the ad linked to, could be sued to treat the symptoms of AIDS. The ad had been served by Google's AdWords. I then complained to AVUSA, the owners of the site I saw the ad on, Google, who served the ad and to the South African Advertising Standards Authority. This week I learnt that mine was not the first complaint and that the Advertising Standards Authority had acted on a complaint from a Patrick Linzer in 2009. Today I can report some responses. I have learnt that Google has removed the ad. Avusa have also blocked the ad. And I have received an acknowledgement of my complaint from the ASA.
The lesson? Well complaining to 'old' and 'new' media companies seems to have worked pretty well in this case. Whether the ('old' media) self-regulatory system (the Advertising Standards Authority) is working for new media is another question. We will see. There's a lot at stake in this. Yesterday, the French President spoke in Paris to an audience including Mark Zukerberg, Rupert Murdoch and Eric Schmidt about Internet regulation. He said: "The world you represent is not a parallel universe where legal and moral rules and, more generally, all the basic rules that govern society in democratic countries do not apply." But he also acknowledged that national regulation does not work (see this week's story of Ryan Gigg's 'superinjunction' to see just how it doesn't). I agree with the Open Right's Group's Jim Killock that "The idea that the internet resembles a 'wild west' is nonsense," but the Internet does undermine the ecology of national law and regulation and self-regulation that has managed and controlled 'oild' mass media. As online citizens our interests will not always be aligned with those of global Internet businesses or of national governments. Finding ways of influencing how a new ecology develops will be an increasing challenge in the next few years.
Hi
ReplyDeleteNice article and thanks for lodging the complaint against Revivo.
Can you tell more about Google removing the ad? Colleagues and I have not had much luck in getting Google to act on quack ads in the past.
Regards
Nathan Geffen
Well I did two things and now its difficult to know exactly what worked. First I completed the AdWords complaint form http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=feedback&origin=cluster&rd=1
ReplyDeleteIn making my complaint I made specific references to the parts of the content guidelines of the AdWords advertising policies that I thought had been infringed by the ad. The content guidelines are available at http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&guide=28435&page=guide.cs
One significant problem with Google's approach (in comparison to the ASA) is that their evaluation of complaints is not transparent and even worse, as they state on their site, they will not inform you as a complainant of the outcome of their review. This really should be challenged.
Back to your question. As well as taking these steps I also mailed a contact of mine at google and told them I had published a blog on adwords. It was this contact who mailed me a couple of days later to tell me that AdWords had removed the ad. So we'll never know if Adwords would have removed the ad without me contacting someone I know.
One route you might think of trying is when you publish something about an Adwords ad (and lodge a complaint via AdWords) maybe it might help if you also mailed a link to your blog to the media relations team at google (press@google.com). Just an idea.
www.quackdown.info is a great site. Glad I discovered it
Indra