Charles Apple

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:

 
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

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