I was leafing through my recent copy of Esquire magazine when I noticed an ad for chewing tobacco. The ad is interrupted with copy that takes up 1/4 of the advertisement
Warning: This product can cause mouth cancer.
Knowing what we know about tobacco and health, should Esquire even allow a chewing tobacco company to advertise in their magazine? Or is the money too green? Or is rejecting a tobacco company a slippery slope into mass censorship of all kinds?
Another example is TrickAJournalist.com, a marketing tool that proclaims to use lead stalking robots and cheetah-like tactics to get journalists to succumb to an onslaught of automated spam.
Trick a Journalist is a satire site I made. I hate what marketing tools today pass off as innovation, when all I see is Spam 2.0. My inbox is loaded with companies selling me the leads of my competitors or companies selling tools that will "continually follow-up with someone automatically" without me having to do a thing. Why is auto-nagging an innovation anyone is proud of?
I created Trick a Journalist to get us talking again about the ethics and rules of marketing software because we've become numb to our inboxes being assaulted.
The site brought up a very interesting question though that I wanted to investigate: If Trick a Journalist were real, should a site like this be allowed to advertise itself everywhere? Or do search engines and social networks already police this stuff?
My first target to explore was Reddit. I get the impression that Reddit is the king of free speech, so they'll let anyone advertise, right? Wrong. Reddit quickly rejected my ad for Trick a Journalist with: "We do not allow this type of service to be promoted on our platform."
My next target was Twitter. Another site that, like Reddit, has had trouble policing for fear of stomping too much on "freedom of speech." Well, I couldn't take an ad out there either. At least not with a brand new anonymous account.
Google, Facebook and LinkedIn, however, all accepted my ad. Google and LinkedIn with completely new accounts.
Facebook's ad was probably the most vile:
And it worked. People signed up from those places for my fake product site.
It's interesting. Clearly, the likes of Google and Facebook could afford to add the type of human element Reddit has, but should they? Should it be their responsibility to vet every advertiser to see how those advertiser's products align with the values of the company running the ad network.
I was glad to see Reddit rejected my ad. I'm a frequent user. I'd hate to see it inundated with real versions of the product Trick a Journalist pitches.
But could their censorship lead to a trend in which all our advertising is up to the judgment of just a few people who control most of our online media?
I'd love to hear what you think. Hit me up on Twitter: @natekontny.
