Shoddy Google Ads

There really are some poor Google Ads kicking about at the moment, and the worst of them seem to be appearing in Gmail (for me at least).

Here's the latest example of something that's thoroughly misrepresentative on many levels.

"Eastenders is Axed"? No it's not. The link is to a strange site called "just-the-issues.com/eastenders".

If you click through you're presented with the following:

Seemingly this is a "BBC Poll" - which I suppose could mean that it's some research commissioned by the BBC (Obviously it's not), or their get-out might be that it's a poll about a BBC programme.

It's strange that someone not connected to the BBC is paying Google to get some response their question of the day. Still, that's what advertising's there for, and if I want to find out the answer to something via research, I'm likely to need to pay someone to get me the answer.

Curiously, the links to both "Yes" and "No" in their "poll" are identical. Hmm.

Clicking through takes you to a random "shopping" site. Goodness knows how I'm supposed to win one their 23 "prizes".

In other words the whole thing is just a traffic driver, and a not very good one at that. Yet Google lets this sort of thing through. I just think that as Google and other online advertisers become bigger, this kind of non-advertising causes me to lose trust in Google as a brand. The top of my email is prime real estate, and it feels like the centre-break of the News at Ten has some kind of Dellboy advertising. It wouldn't happen on ITV, and shouldn't happen on Google.

No doubt if I go through the frustratingly hidden process of reporting the advertiser to Google, I'll eventually get the ad pulled, but since Google makes that hard, I wonder how interested it really is. Yet it should care, and I shouldn't see garbage like this.

Gmail's spam filter works pretty well, but then I get served spam as advertising!