Newsweek (via MSNBC): The Left’s Mr. Right?

Clicking onto this Newsweek story about Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean on MSNBC, readers may have noticed that a banner ad and skyscraper on the page promoted his candidacy (despite the article's skepticism about his political viability). Both ads and the story featured photos of the politician, creating the effect of a Wall of Dean. He's been attracting a lot of attention for his campaign's Internet smarts, but the selling of a placement such as this may run afoul of editorial ethics.


Seems like quite a coincidence (so much so that this jaded hack assumes it's not one). I checked the story on another computer and got the same effect.

It may have been specifically targeted to this article or perhaps to articles that feature the words "Howard Dean." Such placements, called "contiguities" in media planning parlance, bring up the prospect of many more such issues cropping up as companies like Yahoo, Overture and Google deliberately bring their paid search-type targeting into the editorial content of pages.

For my liking, this example smacks a bit too much of advertorial. In the print world, advertisers typically don't get advanced notice about a story to run their ads against, but online, where ads can be added after the fact dynamically, I suppose politicians and other shrewd buyers could retroactively target ads against stories with which they want to be associated.