RinkWorks: Stupid Emails: miscategorized ads

489. miscategorized ads

From:  The Rink <sam@rinkworks.com>
Subject:  miscategorized ads
Date:  Fri, 30 Mar 2007 20:36:27

I just got through deselecting ads that should not have gotten through
my Ad Profile.  Although now I've fixed the problem myself, here is the
information about the miscategorized ads:

        - All the new Adknowledge ads for May are missing the "Text Ads"
                categorization.  It's true that not all of the Adknowledge creatives
                are text ads, but many of them are, and running them in conjunction
                with Google Ads is a violation of their TOS.  We need them to be
                categorized as Text ads so that our Ad Profiles will not auto-select
                them.

        - The Ask.com ads for May should really be considered "Extreme Animation."
                They're worse than some ads which are.

Thanks.

-- Sam.

To:  "sam@rinkworks.com" <sam@rinkworks.com>
Subject:  RE: miscategorized ads
Date:  Fri, 30 Mar 2007 20:36:27

Hi Sam,

While researching the issue with our Traffic Dept, I was told we are not
currently running these campaigns.  You'll want to check with your other
providers on this.

Regards,

This email exchange occurred with one of the advertising networks that I work with. I work with several. An ad you see on RinkWorks pages may have come from any one of them. The Google AdSense ads are pretty recognizable, but you have to look at the HTML comments in the page source to figure out where any other ad came from. Some advertisers work with multiple networks, so sometimes the same exact ad may get to my site via different ad networks. Anyway, all the ad networks let publishers such as myself log into a control panel and configure what types of ads are allowed to run. Ad campaigns can be selected or deselected categorically and/or individually. I allow ads about gambling, for example, but disallow tobacco ads. Two other categories I disallow are "extreme animation" (ads that jitter around distractingly) and "text ads" (ads that look too much like Google AdSense ads and therefore violate the Terms of Service I have with AdSense, which is that no page with an AdSense ad on it will also have a non-AdSense ad that LOOKS like it came from AdSense). In this particular instance, an ad network got two new ad campaigns -- one that was a text ad campaign and not categorized as such, and another that was an extreme animation campaign and not categorized as such. Because the ads weren't categorized properly, they wound up on my site, and I had to deselect them manually. So I sent what I thought was a pretty clear and thorough email about that, so they could fix the problem, and the respond I got back said they aren't running those campaigns at all. Well, uh, yes they are. They're plainly visible in the list of ad campaigns in my control panel, and they're getting served to my site. Gah. But I've left the ad network unnamed, because their publisher support is usually terrific.