With Great Audience Comes Great Responsibility.

Google's finding itself in a bit of a snit these days. There's a new movie out from documentarian Michael Moore called Sicko. It focuses Mr. Moore's cameras at the health care industry in America. As you could probably expect, the health care industry isn't particularly happy about this new movie. What you probably wouldn't expect is that Google - via their Google Health Advertising Blog - is advocating that they provide a first wave of defense against the potential public uprising by offering ideas about how health care advertisers can utilize Google to supply their own information to anyone searching for Sicko based content. A point of view quickly retracted by the writer of the blog post.

The issue that arises is one of editorial conflict of interest. Any publication can set its own editorial policies, and choose what kind of advertising they'd like to have in their pages. Google's advertising network is agnostic, it cannot push one product over another nor one political ideal over another. Doing so diminishes the value of the network.

We bring it up because it is important for advertisers to know how their ad placement decisions effect the potential responses they get from their ads. It probably is a good idea for health care companies to advertise on searches related to the new movie, but thinking up that idea shouldn't be the job of the advertising network.

When you place an ad you need to know if its working. AdSymetrix is here to help. Simply Tag Your Ad and let AdSymetrix track and monitor the responses. You'll know what ads work and what ads are just wasting your time and money.