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Has anyone noticed the advertising by Blue Hawaiian Helicopters splashed all over the pages of the West Hawaii Today stories of the impending disaster in Pahoa showing their birds hovering over flowing lava?
Here is an example:
http://westhawaiitoday.com/news/volcano-...ns-advised
I find that exploitation of our situation in really bad taste.
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Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times".
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Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times".
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I agree but suspect the helicopter tour company has no control on how West Hawaii Today decides how to advertise companies, and also suspect it's all done with coding and not a deliberate decision by anyone at the paper. The code will see "lava" in the article and will post a bunch of lava tour adverts. I doubt a human is in control.
You should make your concerns known to them. It's not beyond software people to fix something like this.
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I sent an email to Blue Hawaiian and did just that.
You should make your concerns known to them. It's not beyond software people to fix something like this.
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Let us know what response you receive, if any, Andrew. Thanks. I suspect they'll refer you to the newspaper, but I will be very happy to be proved wrong.
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I don't see any such ads, but then, I am running Firefox as the browser, with the AdBlock Plus addon installed.
Firefox works on Windows PC's, Android, Mac's...
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Those are Google Adsense ads. You could see those same ads if you were on a recipe web site and have recently been on the BlueHawaiian.com web site.
In this case the newspaper gets revenue from Google every time someone clicks on that ad and more if a reservation is made and it's the newspaper that put that many Google Adsense banners on that page hoping to make more revenue from Google.
Blue Hawaiian can set up their Google Adsense account to target search words like lava. Obviously anyone interested in seeing the lava by helicopter while they're on their vacation might be reading about the current lava flow. Basic marketing concepts.
Those are generic ads for Google Adsense, they weren't created just for that article, but it all came together like that because of how the relationship works between three parties, Google, the advertiser and the publisher. Nothing sinister or exploitation about it, just the way business advertising works in 2014.
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For those that can't see the ads because of ad blocker settings here is a link to a screen capture:
http://nisbet.net/BlueHawaiianAds.html
There are 6 Banner ads on one West Hawaii Today page titled "Lava steadily makes its way toward Pahoa, those with medical conditions advised to evacuate area"
However as both Tom and SBH pointed out they are Google Pay per click scrolling ads which neither West Hawaii Today nor Blue Hawaiian have control over so I was over hasty in my judgement. I had missed that detail in my first perusal.
I still think it is very tacky though but no one is really to blame. Chalk it up to insensitive technology trumping human reality.
___________________________
Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times".
___________________________
Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times".
