Who’s marketing you, and how do you stop it?
Posted by Brad J. Ward | Posted in Marketing, Technology, Web | Posted on 02-11-2008
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I was in Gmail the other day, and I saw an ad for Chico State. Since I’ve been in correspondence with a few guys about BHE, so I think that’s how this is how it was pulled in.
Look closely. That’s a .com. So I followed it. Total ad spam. I think I counted 9 different ads on there.
I wish I had an answer for this question: how do you control this? Is there even anything you can do if a money-hungry company starts advertising on your behalf? I know D.W. posted on a similar Myspace issue earlier.
Anyone out there have some ideas?
I have the same problem with our Mansfield University podcast being scraped a lot. If anyone has ideas on your problem or the scraping, I’d love to hear them.
I would think a cease and desist letter from your legal department complaining about them trying to profit from your good name might be enough to scare them off.
Wonderful. At least they’re not advertising drunken parties.
On a side note, I saw Michael Moore on TV the other night wearing a Chico State lid. Would that be considered good or bad advertising? I guess it depends on who you talk to… Haha
Google your own college. Didn’t see an ad? Lucky, perhaps. But then try it in Yahoo search and other search engines… not so lucky after all.
Google seems to have less of these ads in a direct Web search than other search engine companies, from research I’ve done in the past. Perhaps they have different policies or higher levels of enforcement upon complaint. Some of it likely has to do with their checking the relevance of landing pages.
Also from past experience, if you send a request to Yahoo for these ads to be removed, it goes to a black hole. I’ve never had any luck having ads removed with this approach, or getting a response from Yahoo.
Generally the search advertisers using your good name have something to do with loan companies or online schools, with landing pages set up accordingly. My suspicion is that it often isn’t the lender or online school advertising directly, but, rather, is often some sort of affiliate/profit-sharing scheme.