The appearance of ads for Vodafone and First Direct next to information about the British National party underscored the concern companies have had on advertising on user-generated Web sites. The unpredictability of where ads will be placed, especially when bought in blocks, has been shown by this example.
Ads bought by the two companies were on a rotation where they would appear in intervals on a variety of pages; the reason they ended up on the BNP page.
A spokeswoman for Vodafone said, "As a result we were not aware that a Vodafone advertisement would appear next to a British National party group on Facebook. Our public policy principles state that we do not make political donations or support particular party political interests and therefore to avoid misunderstandings we immediately withdrew our advertising as soon as this was brought to our attention."
First Direct's spokesman said for the company: "We are obviously concerned about where our advertising appears. We have got to make sure that the places we advertise are consistent with our own values and identity."
I'm not sure why these companies are surprised though. Everyone knows it's throwing the dice at this time to put advertising up on the general social networking sites that for the most part have no controls in place.
The latest news is another large company AA, a division of international insurance giant Aviva has also pulled their ads. Ebay (EBAY) says it'll continue advertising on the BNP page.
This is a problem that Facebook and others will continue to face as long as there isn't a way to target pages better. We've talked about it before here that it's one of the reasons online advertising will take longer to scale.
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