I love sketchy advertising. It’s fun, it’s creative and it’s a great way to part retarded people with their money. If you take a look at the ads that are popular right now you will realize their are a lot of other people that are liking sketchy ads too. Here’s the problem. Affiliates don’t know where to draw the line.
Outing ads that are running right now is wrong. I don’t want my ads outed so I’m not going to out anyone elses. If you take a look at some of the ads running on Facebook since all of the changes last week, you will find, their are people putting up ads that are so far over the line, that it makes the Ad Hustler himself cringe. There are 2 problems going on right now that affiliates need to resolve themselves before it effects EVERYONE.
- You can’t use celebrity endorsements (PARTICULARLY THE MOST POWERFUL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD….HINT HINT) without their permission. If you do, you are looking for some serious trouble, some serious money in legal fees, and a possible gaping butthole in a federal prison
- Everyone has copied something in their marketing career. No ones completely innocent of that. The problem lies in that affiliates on Facebook, and everywhere else, are copying each others ads and pictures exactly. It wouldn’t be a huge problem if one person copied the ad, but hundreds or affiliates are copying the same ad. This causes the same ad to display 3 times on the same page which provides a very poor user experience. When users start to complain, Facebook will have to regulate again. This is bad for everyone and is actually one of the reason for the great Google Content Network slap of 2009.
These are two major issues that I hope affiliates can regulate from the bottom up rather from the top down. Don’t do these things yourself. Let other affiliates know to use their brain before stealing ads word for word. If we can’t control this ourselves, our traffic sources are going to crack down on us and we are all going to suffer.
I haven’t used content network for a while now but what was the great Google Content Network slap of 2009 about? Do you have any links to related articles of forum discussions? Google didn’t show me anthing.
@Freebie – Basically a ton of content network campaigns stopped receiving impressions. Mainly autobill blogs were hit because everyone was running the same ads, causing a poor user experience on content network sites. One site would show the same ad by 3 or 4 different affiliates which made the ad-box look ridiculous.
Good stuff and timely… I just went through a similar bit of introspection in trying to decide where to draw the line on a popular offer (free trial + rebill) and lander (blog).
In the end, I decided I need to work on a “gut check” rule…if it doesn’t pass, then I won’t do it.
The problem is making this work in an environment where you know there’s easier money in the doing things more “sketchy” as you put it.
Ad Hustler,
You can’t stop everyone. There always going to stealer and there always going to be inventors. A mind of a stealer is too weak for him to start innovating all of sudden. He is going to steal until he options run out.
I don’t have facebook and i don’t advertise on facebook. I was going to start facebook after Neil recommended it. Since i don’t have an account on facebook and i not planning to have one, i think i’ll pass. I can live without an extra traffic source but can’t tolerate my stuff being jipped that you work so hard at.
-G
so I was browsing FB and: http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/8973/fbgrantog6.jpg
is it the same guy?
Neil, how do you prevent from people stealing your ads? Does it happens a lot?
-g
Bad stuff can happen if people are too un-compliant: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20081124/facebook_spam_081124/20081124?hub=TopStories
At the same time however, why is Facebook approving the ads in the first place if its manual approval.
@Wes – Interesting article. How can a US company sue a Canadian and actually collect on it, if that party is located outside of US jurisdiction? Where is the case held, Canada or the US? There are a lot of questions I ask myself over this article.
Yeah that is completely annoying when you can not get approved the most genuine offers on facebook , then your browsing around and all you see is make 88$ an hour ads which are really annoying, it kinda reminds me of bidvertiser ads when I see some of that stuff, clearly bidvertiser has no intentions of getting their shit together, you can pretty much get anything approved over there. The cheques bidvertiser send are from Israel and have more stickers on them then a kids lunch box. Maybe facebook should move its offices to Israel :O
well we only have ourselves to blame here. somehow we (being wickedfire members) went from publicly lynching anyone who stole a landing page to then allowing lps to be jacked, if they have already been stolen, to now an open house jack everything policy. nearly every lander is jacked most ads are jacked and now nearly every ad is too. now i am definately no angel but i have to say i wish i could roll the clock back 6 months. at least then when i did do something creative i didn’t have 10 copies of it running around by the end of the week. its time for a change guys or we’re gonna implode here.
[…] On February 3rd I wrote the post You Have To Draw The Line Somewhere. […]
I just wish everyone would stop using the geoplugin w/o thinking. My ISP has a whopping 87 people in that town yet every sally, jane and jeff who is revolutionizing their body or financial situation lives there. Wow – whenever I drive through that town (no stop sign much less a stop light) all I see are 80 yr old overweight people who look like they’ve lived a hard life.