It came to my attention within the last few moments that advertisements relating to hospitality packages at Old Trafford were appearing on KopTalk today and I want to explain to you how that can happen. Naturally we would never accept such an advertising campaign.
Ads are usually served automatically by Google. They scan the words on every page and serve ads based on the content. If there is a page with the word ‘Arsenal’ in it for example, then Google will most likely serve ads associated to Arsenal. The word ‘hotel’ will see hotel ads displayed and so on. Advertisers can also target websites e.g. a company that sells football shirts may target football websites regardless of the specific content on it providing the website is football related.
Google do not approach content providers (websites such as ours) to discuss campaigns, they just add them and it is up to us to block advertisers we don’t like.
I hadn’t seen the ads as I’m not in the UK, which is where the complaints were coming from. However, I did connect to the internet using a UK VPN and saw the ads straight away. Now that I have located the destination URL (the website that the ads are promoting), I have now disabled them. It is possible to do that once you locate the offending ads. The only other obvious filter we have in place is for the website of The Sun newspaper. However, if The Sun were to launch a new campaign on another website for a side product, say Sun Cars or Sun Bingo or similar, then such ads could appear without our knowledge. If such was to happen, all you need do is contact us and we would immediately block the offending domains. We have always done this.
KopTalk wasn’t the only Liverpool FC website hit today by the Scum ads as some of our members reported that others had received criticism for running the ads (as people tend to speak out without knowing the facts first). We can’t speak for anyone else and it’s not up for us to tell them what to do but we have blocked the offending ads now that we have been made aware of them.
In future, if you see any ads that offend you, please bring them to our attention because an ad served (displayed) to you may not have been displayed to us. We won’t disable simple text ads relating to other clubs as this would be almost impossible to do but we will obviously block banners that show the scummy emblem of clubs like United.
Please note that once a particular ad/campaign is blocked, it can take Google “a few hours” to block them from appearing.
