Really bad advertising juxtapositions
Bonita Burton, Assistant Managing Editor for Presentation of The Orlando Sentinel, posted last week at VizEds:
You may have heard we had a devastating plane crash in a residential area here last week that demolished several houses, killed five people and left three others fighting for their lives in a burn unit:
So you can understand why our online readers had a problem with this pop-up ad:
Yeah: That’s pretty bad.
Here’s one from the Chicago Tribune, earlier this year. In case you can’t read it, the article is about a severed human leg that fell from a plane into a backyard. But — Yikes! — check out that adjacent ad from United Airlines touting “more legroom”:

Visual culture blogger Dennis Dunleavy provides this example, in which MTV’s news site paired up video of the Virginia Tech shootings with a truly unfortunate ad promoting the movie Smokin’ Aces:

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Kate Zimmermann of SearchViews gives us this similar snapshot of Yahoo News on the day of the Tech shootings:

And then, there is this unflattering article about print newspapers that appeared on the Media Daily News web site last spring. This helping of gloom-and-doom was brought to you, naturally, by the good folks at the Newspaper Association of America:

Here, it looks like Fox News is commenting on Wesley’s Clark’s bid for the White House. But no, that’s a headline about the approach of Hurricane Isabel. Ironically, the headline would have been accurate for either story:

A couple of weeks ago, the Oddee Web site posted a collection of interesting badly juxtapositioned ads. A few samples:




It took me a while to “get” this one. But once I did, I nearly fell off my chair:

So: what’s the worst juxtaposition you’ve ever seen?
Find Oddee’s “15 Unfortunately Placed Ads” here:
http://www.oddee.com/item_87332.aspx
Read Dennis Dunleavy’s article “Not A Pretty Picture: When Ad and News Messages Collide” in his blog, The Big Picture:
http://ddunleavy.typepad.com/the_big_picture/2007/04/not_a_pretty_pi.html
Read Kate Zimmermann’s article about “The Suckiness of Contextual Ads” at the SearchViews web site:
http://www.searchviews.com/index.php/archives/2007/04/virginia-tech-shootings-role-of-social-media-search-in-journalism-and-the-suckiness-of-contextual-ads.php
See more examples of bad juxtaposition at the eMedia Strategist:
http://www.emediastrategist.com/blog/?p=33
Read the original thread at VisualEditors:
http://www.visualeditors.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6607


August 8th, 2007 at 5:13 am
[...] Read our post from last week about embarrassing ad juxtapositions here: http://www.visualeditors.com/apple/2007/07/really-bad-advertising-juxtapositions/ [...]
April 14th, 2008 at 8:09 am
[...] our previous post about amusingly awful advertising juxtapositions. And we once wrote about a very tacky ad we spotted on the web site of a large paper that oughta [...]
June 25th, 2008 at 9:06 am
Here’s another one for you, no pop-up involved:
http://www.intuitive.com/blog/hilarious_tombstoning_gaffe_in_local_newspaper.html
Thanks for the fun list!
August 13th, 2008 at 10:12 am
[...] Find our earlier thread here about really bad advertising juxtapositions. [...]
September 28th, 2008 at 1:42 am
[...] posted about other unfortunate ad juxtapositions here and [...]
September 30th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Funny stuff - but the screenshot attributed to Yahoo News isn’t Yahoo News. The logo on the right is just the “powered by Yahoo” for that site’s search tool.