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Major Advertisers Caught In Spyware Net
theodp writes "BW reports on Fortune 500 companies' use of adware - Sprint for its PCS phones, major banks peddling Visa cards, Sony and retailers including Circuit City. And Mercedes-Benz before the company, fielding complaints, put on the brakes. So far, law enforcement has mostly targeted the transmitters, but NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is threatening to hold accountable household-name advertisers that use adware networks. No longer, says Spitzer, can companies play dumb."
quite simply, the only way we will see the end of adware and spam is if they stop being profitable. this is excellent news, and i sincerely hope goes ahead with his threat.
Not really - the AG would simply follow the money, right back to you. Spizer is going after willful ignorance, namely when you suspect there's a problem but chose just not to investigate it too closely thus remaining willfully ignorant.
Thalasar
This happened to our company numrous times. We use a variety of advertising agencies like comission junction, doubleclick.com, etc... We basically don't really know what they're doing most of the time, we just give them a tracking code and a URL to lead customers and calculate how many leads per $$$ they generate.
Alot of the times, many of these sites like Comission Junction, just empowers members to post our links whereever. They just take our links, add their tracking code and URL to it, and give them to their members to include on their website. These members sometimes will result in dubious behavior to generate hits, and will often use ways to force the links on you. I'm sure you probably see those "Free" something that tell you to click on a dozen link before they send you the free iPod or something, then afterwards, find some trick to get out of sending you that iPod. Others sometimes use adware and other malicous software methods.
Sometimes we see certain agencies generate such good results, we give them even more money. We don't realize they're doing wrong until we start getting complaints. I've witness things such as our ads being included in adware (like Gator), porn sites, spam mail, chat bots, etc...
It's really hard to hard to control the means our ads get distributed using 3rd party agencies. But we're sort of forced to rely on them since we're a small company with little know how in advertising. It's much easier to pay other people do the work and focus on developing a good product.