eBay Still Selling Slaves, MSN Embarassed
Some of you may recall a couple years ago when eBay appeared to be selling African slaves. Basically, when setting up an extensive PPC campaign with Google AdWords, the e-commerce giant had bid on a plethora of keywords so that no matter what users typed into Google, there was a high likelihood that one of the sponsored results would be an eBay ad. Long story short, the controversial ads that advertised the biggest selection of low priced African Slaves were chalked up to a humanly typical clerical error, and the ads were quicly pulled. As you'd expect, moreover, no such sponsored result seemed to have ever appeared on Google again.
What is unexpected, however, is that two years later, such ads are still running on other search engines, and eBay ins't the only guilty party. Using Kanoodle, searching for either keywords "Black Slaves" or the key words "Africa Slaves" returns some suprisingly disturbing result.
First you'll notice that in both sets of results, MSN is advertising their own Live Search product. You'll also notice that the second sponsored search result is an ad for Lycos' search product, but they are and admittedly B-level search engine. MSN's Live Search, on the other hand, is supposed to a viable alternative to Google, if not an outright Google killer. That they'd be advertising with an operation as (relatively) small as Kanoodle must be embarassing indeed.
More to the point, however, is that eBay still seems to be bidding on such controversial keyword combinations such as "Black Slaves" and "African Slaves." Furthermore, they aren't alone this time around. It seems that Monster Marketplace is on it as well, and although they are ranking below eBay in the sponsored results, they seemed to have picked up the risque description that eBay had the good sense to abandon. While eBay's ad looks more like a bug with its generic description of "Find exactly what you want today," Monster Marketplace goes so far as to brag about its "great selection of Black [or African} Slaves."
Mind you, eBay's hands are completely clean in the matter. Aside from a history of such PPC mishaps, you'll notice that the sponsored result below that for Monster Marketplace is for eBay Stores, and while it doesn't boast its selection or pricing of Black or African slaves, it does go so far as to suggest you love them.
The most surprising element about all of this isn't that it happened, but that it has happened again! On the one hand, you'd figure that eBay would have had the good sense to have somehow removed such controversial keyword combinations from its list of terms that it automatically bids on. On the other hand, you'd also figure that someone out there, other than me, would be checking for these things. Indeed, the same effect can be observed when search for "Sex Slaves" as well as "underaged boys". If I was the Director of Marketing over at eBay or Monster Marketplace, I'd definitely be looking into hiring another PPC manager.
