• WSJ (paid subscription required), Wednesday, April 5, 2006 12 PM

Marketers rushing to advertise their products and services on the Internet are finding the trend sometimes comes with a price that goes beyond the cost of the ads--embarrassment. Several advertisers have recently had to pull their ads after they appeared adjacent to sexually oriented or otherwise controversial material. The situation occurs because ads for small sites are sold through middlemen who don't always carefully monitor where the ads are posted. "There needs to be better accountability and more oversight of this," says Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe, whose company was surprised to find one of its Internet ads on a MySpace.com page with photos of scantily clad women. In other media, advertisers and their agencies have developed ways to monitor their print and TV ads and have created lists of shows they won't buy into, often those with controversial content. In both print and TV, marketers routinely buy ads on condition their spots don't run adjacent to certain content--such as news of a tragedy.

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