With Facebook losing two of its major advertises due to conflict of interests the Central Office for Information has released an order banning its own internet advertising on user-generated pages.
Article is taken from the Financial Times (p3 by Carlos Grande, Marketing Correspondent).
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The Central Office of Information, the body that coordinates government advertising, has order that is internet campaigns be kept off user-generated pages on social networking websites to prevent their display next to contentious or offensive content.
Guildlines to Ilevel, the agency that buys internet advertising slots for the COI, were recently updated to cover personal web pages. The move was part of a long standing ban on government adverts appearing near racist of sexist material.
The internet policy is designed to avoid the types of incident that hit companies such as Vodafone, First Direct, Halifax, Prudential's healthcare division and the AA last week.
The businesses all pulled advertising from Facebook, the popular networking site, after their campaigns were discovered running next to a page with details for the British National Pary, the far-right group.
Vodafone said the incident broke its rules on political impartiality. it an other companies pledged not to resuse Facebook without reassurances on the editorial context in which their adverts would appear.
COI is one of the UK's largest advertisers, with a total operations budget of more than £330m. Its wary engagement with networking sites may influence commerical marketers to follow suit.
The COI has attempted to communicate to the large audiences that visit websites such as Bebo or MySpace, while controlling where its adverts appear. It has used Bebo, which does not sell advertising on personal pages of MySpace users.
Alan Bishop, the COI chief executive, said context was a general issue raised by marekting on the internet that accounts for a greater share of UK advertising expenditure than national newspapers or radio.
In an FT interview, he said: "We always have to keep a very clsoe eye on the context. People are still getting to grips with this. We don't want to exclude use of any of the new socila media but we do have to have a very clear idea of what the context is going to be like".
The COI is in a particularly sensitive position. Last year it spent £135m of public money buying advertising space in mainstream media and a further £10.4m online.
Its campaigns often tackle hard-hitting crime, health or education issues and some times target young or ethnic minority audiences.
Although it increased expenditure on digital media by 85 per cent in 2006-07, the COI is aware of the dangers as well as the advantages of communicating via the web.
A recent BBC Panorama programme featured fight videos postered on advertising funded websites, although there is no evidence of COI campaigns running on these sites.
Mr Bishop cited a theoretical example in which COI's anti-bullying campaigns would be underminded i they appeared on websites that also showed film clips of real fights.
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BBC's webpage about the Panorama programme
I saw that Panorama programme and to be honest I was appalled and turned off the TV. Some may say, well Miles you like living in your own safe world, and perhaps that is true. However, I do not see the enjoyment of seeing children beat each other up and then "friends" glorifying such acts of violence by posting them on You Tube. Now one of the examples given in the documentary was a UK based vlog site which says that every video is viewed by a moderator (Liveleak). However, there are videos posted from soldiers in warzones, the more violent children fights and so on......