

New York Times learns the possible risks of programmatic advertising - techcofounder
http://pando.com/2014/03/24/oof-new-york-times-learns-the-possible-risks-of-programatic-advertising/

======
patio11
This is one of those cases where humans are so good at seeing patterns they'll
intuit the presence of an intelligence (artificial or otherwise) where none
exists. The only algorithm here is "Apple paid for a placement on this date",
rather than anything content-aware.

(With regards to how actual content-aware ads treats this sort of case: My
recollection is that waaaaay back in the day AdSense shipped with a "death and
tragedy filter" such that if it detected the page was about them it would turn
ads off. The Google which made that decision is no longer - these days it's an
unchecked-by-default setting controlled by advertisers. Somewhat surprisingly
for Google, the filter was _really_ unsophisticated - on the order of a simple
keyword blacklist. Some of my SEO buddies had CMSes which would flag words
thought to be problematic for writers, so that an innocuous phrase like
"Getting your taxes done doesn't have to be a Greek tragedy" didn't end up
killing ad revenue from the page.)

------
kgermino
As a comment on the site says - this is almost certainly _not_ programmatic
advertising but a premium placement paid for by Apple at least a few days ago.

Also, I don't see how this is intellectually stimulating, of interest to a
Hacker, or anything other than a mildly amusing picture. Amusing pictures have
a place, but this doesn't seem to belong here.

------
xpose2000
This is not newsworthy. If you hit the refresh button enough times on
upsetting news stories I am sure you will find a somewhat offensive ad every
now and then.

------
ahemphill
I've worked with Apple on homepage advertising and believe the likelihood of
that placement being programmatic is very low.

~~~
FireBeyond
Agreed, I worked for MSN.com for a while, and any ad placement like that is
not your random, average ‘served from doubleclick’ style ad. It’s premium, and
planned, human controlled.

------
ars
> reproduced without further comment

Maybe you should add a comment? What's the problem?

Only thing I can think of is the jet in the ocean and a picture of the ocean,
but that's a stretch.

~~~
dragonwriter
Well, "iPad Air" text in an underwater scene has more unfortunate resonance
with a story about an airliner crashing into the ocean than just the "ocean"
connection.

In a print newspaper, this is the kind of association of advertiser and story
that would have been actively avoided by a human (and which, from what I've
heard -- though I have no direct experience -- advertisers would be irate
about and even cancel accounts over if it _wasn 't_ avoided.)

