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

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 7:20 am and is filed under Amusing stuff, News design, Newspapers, VizEds Blog, Web news design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.