[smoe]

I worked for the biggest swiss news site, which also had an option to disable ads for a story in the CMS.

In this case, it wasn't an acknowledgement that ads are invasive and uncomfortable in general, the problematic ads were those shown based on keywords of the story. E.G. an advertisement about how safe car X is in a story about an fatal car accident.

[blowski]

I remember a Land Rover advert being shown right next to a story about a fatality caused by a fault in the very model being advertised. I've also seen problems with, say, holidays to Paris being advertised next to a story about the Charlie Hebdo killings.

The problem must be that the highest traffic stories are typically the most sensitive ones.

[smoe]

I see the problem more in the fact, that a lot of publishers try to squeeze out some ad money from every single blank space still left on the page and fill it with third party services where they have no control over the actual booking. It is simply impossible to foresee what inappropriate ads might be shown if you don't now the pool.

In contrast to the directly sold banners, where the marketing team might just postpone a whole scheduled campaign for an airline when half the front page is filled with stories about a plane crash.

Still I think it's impossible to avoid some inappropriate ads at time and one has to live with it.

[Shivetya]

so the issue is creating an ad delivery service that understands the context of the articles on the pages its serving. I would think there are a good many methods to pull that off but even then perhaps the risk to real?

[mattlondon]

The trouble is, most ad serving systems already work out the context/theme of pages and target ads appropriately but even then its not perfect.

E.g. you are an airline and you want to advertise your flights. You might want to have your ad appear on pages that have contexts of "travel, flying, vacations" etc since you believe that those pages are likely good pages to reach people interested in your services. Sounds reasonable. An advertiser would obviously NOT want to appear advertising their cheap flights to Tenerife next to this sort of terrible, tragic news.

As others have mentioned its perceived as bad for the brand be be seen next to bad news, but more importantly (and more likely IMHO) people are human and understand the gravity of the situation so apply common sense and tact.

So it gets into a silly situation where you have advertisers targeting contexts "travel, flying, vacations AND NOT disaster, crash" - whilst you are there you may as well start excluding some other negative things too, like "thailand, children, ladyboy" etc etc until you have these huge lists of tens of thousands of exclusions getting into the ridiculous depths of human depravity, whilst you just want to show on "good" pages about just 3 simple contexts: travel, flights or vacations.

And even then ads sometimes still slip through and appear on "bad" pages because someone forgot to put "erotic trepanation" or whatever in the exclusion list.

[smoe]

I agree and think it's impossible to foresee every possible "bad" correlation. Furthermore the problem is not limited to advertisement but every type of automated content. E.G. a widget with a generated list of "related stories" or an autocomplete search box.

With more and more of this style of content being used, it is in my opinion important to better inform the not so tech savvy public, that computer generated relations can be really useful but will yield some results that are wrong or might seem distasteful for the human mind.