Monday, August 24, 2015

The drama in programmatic online advertising





“Via @LeHuffPost Quand actu et pub se mêlent de manière hasardeuse... #Germanwings”
In times of adversity, online advertising routines fail. Drastically

The above example of an inappropriate display ad is just one in a range of similar advertising anomalies following the crash of Germanwings flight 4U9525 in March 2015. In the hours and days after such events, newspapers witness an increased online traffic to their websites and reports about the disasters in particular. Unfortunately, such reports are often accompanied by inappropriate advertising. Similarly, users of social media often encounter those ads at those times. Conversations on social media about such inappropriate ads often blame either the websites (i.e., news outlets) or the advertisers. But whose fault is it anyway? How should we understand this? And most important, how should different stakeholders within the online advertising business prepare themselves to avoid such mistakes in the future?