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Marketers fear their ads will run alongside questionable content
IT LOOKS A lot like a case of too much consumer control.
A Yahoo chat-room-pedophilia scandal has exposed an ugly, but often hidden, truth about marketing online: You don't always know what content will appear alongside your ad.
State Farm, PepsiCo and Georgia-Pacific, stunned to find their ads were being delivered to chat rooms that were being used by pedophiles to make contact with children, pulled their ads from the Internet portal. Yahoo eventually shut the chat rooms down.
UNIQUE ISSUES
The Web's freewheeling culture of blogs and chat rooms that are open to the world presents unique challenges to monitoring the environment ads appear in. "Companies are increasingly concerned with whether it's worth the legal risk to have these public forums, blogs and chat rooms," said Jeff Newberger, partner at law firm Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner, which...