The perils of porn

Taking advertising dollars from adult-entertainment businesses is a lot like having a loaded gun in the house. You're certainly within your rights to do so, but once you decide to do it, you have to be extraordinarily careful.

Our newspaper has accepted ads for "gentlemen’s clubs" for years, placing them almost exclusively in the sports section where we provide the advertisers with exactly the demographic they’re seeking. The adult-entertainment business is a multibillion-dollar industry. The clubs have money to spend, and we want them to spend it with us. Otherwise, they’d just spend it with the growing number of area sports-talk radio stations.

Recently my team created a multimedia destination page for our coverage of an international youth sports championship that was about to take place in our area. Once we had populated the page with a Flash presentation, videos and photo galleries, I proudly sent a link to the PR firm we were working with so they could take a look. Minutes later, I received a call from the account rep, who said they loved everything about the presentation except for the strip-club ad that was prominently displayed on the page.

My first thought was that he was kidding. But when I called up the page, there it was. Or rather, there SHE was, adult film star Kayla Paige, whose special appearance was being announced by a local gentleman’s establishment. We quickly discovered the ad was running all over our site, not just in sports. And that wasn’t the worst of it. If you happened to click on the ad, you were redirected to a page that revealed the young woman in all her glory.

Fortunately for us, we caught the mistake before anyone else did, other than our PR friends who brought it to our attention. The ad was supposed to have been limited to our sports pages. But even then, a further restriction should have been put on it to keep it off pages like this youth sports one, where the audience – at least the parents in the audience – would likely have found it highly objectionable. And the click-through page was supposed to have been a benign splash page instead of the pornographic page that was there.

The lessons we learned? When dealing with adult-oriented ads, especially online, handle with care. Think about areas of your site where the ads might not be suitable, even if it’s within a category – like sports – where you might want the ad to run. And without exception, make sure you check and doublecheck any hyperlinks in the ads.