Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

The "Shoot the Rapper" banner ad that ran on MySpace (NWS-A) underscores the reason why so many companies have been slow to put their wares on social networking sites.

The blogger who first saw it while looking at the profile of a Virginia Tech victim said, "I was looking at one student’s MySpace profile, and noticed the rotating banner ad: 'Shoot the Rapper, win $5,000.' I hope MySpace deletes the ad soon."

Shawn Gold, CMO of MySpace said that banner ads on MySpace aren't placed contextually and so whatever is happening is random.

"That's a random network ad that runs throughout out site, and it's not connected contextually because we don't place banner ads contextually on MySpace," said Gold. "It's inappropriate if the ads are running on those profiles, and we can eliminate them from our network if that's the case."

The problem is that this is a random, rotated ad. There is no way of knowng where it will end up from moment to moment.

Not only are the ads in bad taste as they land on these students' sites, but from a marketing standpoint banner ads are used to brand a company, not for direct-response advertising, which makes the problem even worse.

This is definitely something social networking sites will have to manage before major advertisers get on board for branding purposes.