ChasNote

I’m watching CNN on a Virgin America flight from JFK to SFO, and the lead story (at 10:25am Eastern) is the crash of a cargo plane near Shanghai that killed all 3 Americans on board. At the next break, the second commercial is for British Airways — a spot built around China’s Canton Fair, a 3-week event at which (according to the voice-over) $2 billion dollars a day trade hands.

Eek, airline ads bumping up next to news of airplane crashes?!

For years I’ve been asked by marketers how I’ll protect their brands if they run ads on blogs that allow comments or sites like Digg, where readers select the stories that get promoted to the homepage. My answer has always been: The same way CNN does it. “If, god forbid, there’s a plane crash, CNN must cover the story. So someone in CNN’s traffic department immediately pulls all airline advertisers out of rotation until that news cycle passes.” While humans are still better than algorithms at avoiding (or recovering from) these kinds of awkward associations, the CNN approach — as I just witnessed — remains an imperfect system.

Do I now need to find a new example with which to answer that question, or should I just point out that those uncomfortable situations you fear will happen online are also happening on TV?

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch has a piece on one of my favorite topics, embarrassing moments in contextual advertising. These snafus are generally best at news sites, like this example from CNN (or this one), where news coverage of illegal steroid use in professional sports pulls along with it ads for sketchy purveyors of said steroids.