Advertising your institution on a number of sites via text, banner, or even pre-roll videos ads has become ever more popular as the shift from print to digital takes hold. There is one downside to this change though, loss of context control.
You can make a well branded and copy written ad and spend hours on your landing page. Making sure to catch every user possible and track all your conversions but it can all be destroyed by the context you ad is placed in. An example of this was brought to my attention last night.
An Example
The twitter account @420revolution posted this status:
Oakland University Supports Marijuana Use https://bit.ly/4joFGJ
Which leads you to a Digg.com article with the same title and description:
Self Explanatory
You finally end up at a YouTube video of a screen cast which shows an Oakland University commercial with the words “The following clip is brought to you by Oakland University”. What follows is a video by HowCast explaining “How to legally obtain medical marijuana.” Here is the video:
The tweet was eventually re-tweeted a few times and dugg a handful of times. Luckily this example was not a PR nightmare for the institution and it was on a site like Hulu which does have a good grasp on the content they push out. But as site start to push out more user generated content be prepared for the sorts of things an ad could endorse.
The Lesson
Obviously Oakland University did not place this ad on this particular video but the more online ads are being dispersed on sites with wide ranges of content it becomes impossible to control what context your message is being displayed in.
I am not sure the advertising policy or options Hulu gives to its advertisers as far as targeting. But this would apply to any site your university advertises on that could have questionable content or user generated content. Where does the line get drawn between promoting yourself and endorsing a product/service/opinion you have no control over?
Your Thoughts
Have you come across other examples of university advertising #contextfail? Or have policies/guidelines at your institution that only allow you to promote in approved spaces?
With their public face, Oakland U would obviously denounce their association with this video.
But, let’s face it, this YouTube video is probably getting them more attention nationally, and more return on their advertising dollars, than their Hulu spend did.
Was Oakland University prepared for this when the news finally got big enough? Big entities like Oakland U or commercial corporations should start getting social media watchdog policies in place to monitor such potential SM nightmares.