Originally published on Epolitics.com
Minor scuffle in the online communications world: BP has purchased Google Ads on search terms related to the Gulf oil spill (for example: "oil spill"), with its ads showing up at the top of the results column whenever people look for those keywords. The resulting landing page is neatly scrubbed of most oily nastiness, putting a very bright face on the company's cleanup work and avoiding discussion of BP's ultimate corporate responsibility. Unethical? Or just distasteful?
The argument against BP's search campaign has two main two aspects: First, some articles have claimed that people often don't discriminate between organic and paid search results, even though the paid ads are in a different color and marked as "sponsored links." This tendency could lend extra credibility to BP's link, since it shows up at the top of the search results list, making it an "Orwellian" attempt to control the public dialogue (a view amplified by media coverage saying that the company "bought search terms" rather than "bought ads related to search terms). But again, the ads are marked as "sponsored," and BP could have avoided the critique almost entirely by purchasing only s...
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[Source: Technology on HuffingtonPost.com]
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