The Latino Rebels “Cookies” Find More @CafePress “Spics” Ads: This Time It’s @YouTube

Mar 11, 2012
4:28 PM

After chatting back and forth with Daily Kos @Markos about racist Cafepress ads that appeared on his site, one suggestion was to connect with Google, who manages the ad service Daily Kos uses on its site. Granted, even though @Markos did say Daily Kos would block the offensive ads and thanked us for alerting him, we still think that Daily Kos should spent a little more human time checking out its ad content and rethinking it ad system. We hope that in the future (and we think Daily Kos will be more aware of it moving forward) pages such as Kos just don't run their ads on automatic. They run the risk of embarrassing situations by doing so, and if web sites control their content, they should also control their ads.

The argument that our cookies were the cause of the SPICS ad showing up on Daily Kos is a bit illogical in our opinion. Sure, we have been covering the CafePress mess from several computers, but does that mean that the algorithm that Google uses for our profile is accurate? Does that mean that we love to get coupons for racist products?

Having a consumer-driven ad system is just dumb. No automatic system can determine the human nuances of a consumer and it they pretend to do that and more importantly, sell that strategy to clients, it is irresponsible. We will continue to argue that content and ads are the responsibility of the web pages that display them, the services that places them, and the companies that create them. All three (Daily Kos, Google, and CafePress) are at fault in this case. Now that Daily Kos is blocking this type of ad, good. But why was it there in the first place? Rethink your ad strategy, @Markos. Control it 100% and you won't run into situations like you did earlier this week.

So now we will follow up with Google, and they should be expecting a call from us tomorrow, especially since (and could this get any more funny and surreal?) when we checked out our YouTube channel over the weekend and the little video that we did about Daily Kos and CafePress, we saw the same SPICS ad from Daily Kos page next to the video. The Latino Rebels Cookies strike again! Here is the screen shot of the first time it happened:

So we cleaned our cache and our cookies and it happened again:

The third time we cleaned out cache and our cookies, waited two days, and a new ad had cycled. Here it is:

Our take on all this? Automated ad networks based on advanced algorithms are a major fail. And if consumers don't raise awareness about this, we will all just be suckers and fools.