It may be time for Amazon.com and its Internet Movie Database site to change their strategy, as two advertisers left the site recently over their inclusion of porn movie titles in their database. Dropping advertising from the site were The National Lottery and Barclaycard.
A spokesman for Barclaycard said: "As company policy, we seek to advertise only on reputable websites and temporarily removed our adverts from this site while we carried out a full investigation and spoke to the website."
Why Amazon.com (AMZN) will include porn in its Internet Movie Database is hard to explain. Let's see, we'll have our marketing next to Disney's Bambi, and then we'll have it next to XXXs Bambi. Is there something they don't understand about that?
I don't see this as a similar issue as Facebook recently encountered, where they had to offer tools to advertisers so they could control where their content went.
Amazon.com Listing Porn on its IMDB Website
In this case it's the inclusion of porn on the Amazon.com IMDB site itself that causes the damage, not only advertising that may happen to be next to it.
With brands being especially sensitive on the Internet as far as what their content may end up next to, it doesn't make sense to offer porn as if it's just another form of entertainment or movie. Millions of consumers will find that highly offensive and could very well make companies pay for it.
Are people really getting this stupid and ignorant? Do they believe that consumers and people today don't care about these issues? I think they may find out the hard way that they do. Just drop the garbage from the database, it offers no social value to people as it is. To include as equal in some way to other movies is a sad commentary on what Amazon.com thinks of its customers.
Get your head out of your rear Amazon, millions of people don't subscribe to your interpretation of them.
Companies still keeping their advertisements next to porn listings are HP (HPQ), Motorola (MOT), Hilton Hotels (HLT), Citroën and Vauxhall, among others. Let them know what you think about it.
Comment Preview