brand larceny
Posted by Anthony Zumpano on October 1, 2009 12:08 PM
Brands with user-generated content have to be on alert for user-generated damage. As Facebook increases its ad partnerships on the way to achieving positive cash flow, some questionable affiliate ads appearing on the site have directed users’ ire at the social networking brand itself.
If you’ve used your Facebook account recently, you may have seen ads for Mylife.com, implying that a young, hot, scantily clad female has been Google-hunting you. But, Forbes reports, the ladies in those photos probably don’t know they’re appearing in those ads.
Worse, the images were likely lifted from a site like Jailbaitgallery.com (the name is literal and the site is NSFW), which consists of personal photos from Facebook and other sources, lifted without permission.
Econsultancy's Meghan Keane notes that “neither Facebook nor MyLife broke any policy with the ads, and this kind of thing is likely to continue to some degree with affiliate advertising.” This doesn’t mean the brands won’t suffer for it, however, and both are already on defense: Facebook notes that users can flag questionable ads, and David Oh, MyLife’s manager of marketing design and development, claims that rogue affiliates won’t get paid for using ads like these.
This only raises questions of true responsibility. Is it enough for brands like these to rely on self-policing users to report brand violations, from Craigslist fraud to Wikipedia vandalism, or must they allocate more of their own time and resources to maintain brand integrity?
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