ChasNote

AIG accepted (selectively at least) an invitation from Daily Kos to engage directly with its readers.

“On Tuesday, I posted a press release I’d received from AIG media relations rep Peter Tulupman in response to a post I’d written expressing outrage at the news of yet another expensive AIG retreat taken after the taxpayer bailout. In the Tuesday post, I invited Daily Kos readers to submit questions to Mr. Tulupman in the hopes that the desire he expressed on behalf of AIG to engage in dialogue with our community was geniune.”

To his credit, AIG’s Tulupman agreed to answer some of the questions.

There are hundreds of questions and comments, some that are very angry and some that are especially unflattering to AIG. At this point, though, AIG can’t be too worried about damaging its brand more than its been damaged by the evening news. And, meanwhile, I bet a small percentage of Daily Kos readers go deep into those comments, meaning (if I’m right) the bulk of the Daily Kos community will read the few questions AIG opts to answer — which aren’t going to be the most scathing — and will leave the experience with at least a small measure of new respect for AIG. Hey, they joined the fray.

Why does a brand need to be in so much trouble before its willing to jump into the mosh pit?

(Thanks, Rolf!)

According to Nielsen (see NY Times), banner ads for Mitt Romney’s presidential candidate ran 515,000 times on Gay.com. AOL’s Advertising.com, the ad network that accidentally put ads for the anti-gay candidate on the pro-gay (and anti-Romney) site, says the number of impressions was only 32,000.

Romney’s ads also ran alongside pornographic scenes of Harry Potter and Hermione Granger on fiction site FanFiction.net. McCain ads ran on liberal-leaning Huffington Post, Guliani ads ran on progressive DailyKos, Obama ads ran on Amazon alongside a book deemed by Jewish groups to be anti-Semitic.

“Part of the issue seems to be that political strategists came into the campaign season unschooled in the challenges of Internet advertising, and Web advertising sales outlets are not necessarily aware of the unique sensitivities of each presidential campaign.”

I believe the first part — political strategists may not know how online ad networks work. But the second? Oh come on. The problem isn’t that the people at “Web advertising sales outlets” like Advertising.com aren’t politically savvy enough to understand the “unique sensitives” of their advertisers. It’s that they don’t have those people on staff; the ads are targeted and served by computer algorithms that don’t know how to worry about sensitivities.