Occupationsxetentcy: Making Money Advertising

The Federal Trade Commission has gone to war against all the fake news sites. If you’ve visited almost any real news site recently, you’ve most likely seen these advertisements that advertise a “special report” from some news station you never heard of, has discovered the cure to belly fat or a special new secret to working from home. First these fake news sites completely ticked-off the public, who filed complaints against the owners with everyone from the FBI to the FTC. The FTC took the complaints seriously and earlier this year filed several lawsuits against those involved in these practices.

However, while this is progress, the FTC has completely ignored the actions of the large companies that allow these types of advertisements.

The issue here is simple: while the advertisers, and affiliate networks are being targeted by the FTC for compliance actions for creating these deceptive websites, the large advertising networks, including Pulse360 and AOL’s own network continues to run these ads, knowing that they are deceptive and causing harm to consumers. Worse, the companies that run these ads are major news organizations, where the ads seem like real news stories embedded in the content.

When I was talking to the writer for this AdAge article, I pointed out that the VP of Sales at MSNBC, Kyoo Kim has recognized this as a problem and said almost 18 months ago that they would no longer allow these advertisements. As the reporter of the AdAge story pointed out, the original story, also run by MSNBC was still actually flanked by these advertisements. They knew that these ads were a problem, admitted it, but then went back on their promise and continued to make money from it.

Continued on the next page

With this story fresh in my mind, somehow, randomly surfing, I ended up at the following site:

http://palinemail.msnbc.msn.com/index.html

Please bear with me…

Not knowing exactly what I was looking at, I observed that while this APPEARED to be a site sponsored by some independent communications/litigation research organization, Crivella West (but somehow I can't help thinking "Cruella deVille" — is it just me?) it is actually hosted on the MSNB site.

Well, it's a partnership between MSNBC, Mother Jones, Pro Publica and these guys. But something didn't add up. Why the Crivella banner on an MSNBC IP address, since they have their own separate host? That's pretty unusual.

So I went to the main CW site — off the MSNBC main host — and it was login protected. The "About" link didn't say much, so I clicked on "Public Collections" to see what all they put online for the general public …

… and that led back to the MSNBC page — the inner part of the URL being "palinemail".

Funny, an organization claiming a broad mandate to study the use of language in public discourse, support the storage of information in formats that facilitate "litigation" activities — one having such an incestuous internet relationship with MSNBC that it apparently matters not which site hosts their web pages — maintains a web page whose name suggests a vast array of multifaceted information on these subjects … and it is just a dump of Palin emails.

Not only that, the URL itself constitutes an admission that "Public Collections" actually only means "resources with which to try to smear Sarah Palin".

Apparently the pretense embarrassed someone at CW enough that, farther down the page, is another repository of public communications from the GW Bush White House. Fair enough, but this means, of course, that the category "GW Bush communications" is effectively, according to their online catalogue, a subcategory of "Palin Emails". Bizarre … well, not really, it's pretty transparent, actually!

And an interesting cataloguing absurdity for an organization that makes the following claim about itself:

"Recognizing the insufficiencies of many production discovery agreements and the dearth of any real pragmatic suggestions, Crivella West developed the industry’s first Production Format Standard. The Crivella West Production Format Standard contains recommendations relating to the form and format of Electronically Stored Information (“ESI”) and Physically Stored Information (“PSI”)."

I'll give the person creating this page a bit more credit for realising how stupid this appears, as they appeared to try to rectify the jarring addition of the Bush stuff with a (slightly backhanded) glowing recommendation of it:

"These documents serve as an excellent first person case study of 21st century political influence and decision making."

Love it! Now, perhaps the GWB collection is indeed an excellent example (of proper communication within a serious administration). The same could be said of the Palin emails. What would lead these guys, however, to make such a potentially supportive (or, at worst, ambiguous) statement about the president they clearly despise, or to place it on the page in such a way as to suggest that Palin's emails ALSO provide an excellent example.

I wonder when they plan the logical next subdirectory of the "Palin Email" collection, namely President Obama's communications that will surely leave yet another "excellent first person case study of 21st century political influence and decision making". I eagerly anticipate that. Or how about his communications from his term as Senator? I'm sure he and his chum Blago had some interesting conversations.

… and I wonder what led them to decide that a governor of little Alaska would provide such a great example for those wishing to understand the inner workings of 21st century American governance that her works define the central organizing principle of their governance communications archive? When, I wonder, are they planning to publish the communications of recent governors from the OTHER 49 states?

I wonder if they realise that all their efforts help — rather than hurt — the legacies of these hard-working leaders by publicly establishing the integrity of their work? I also wonder if there is Soros money in this project? If so, then to borrow a phrase, I have met the enemy … and he is clueless.

on line reputation management

Occupationsxetentcy

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