» GoPro gets unwanted advertising as Toulouse killer filmed himself killing the kids wearing one
Mar 27 2012
11 Comments
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GoPro gets unwanted advertising as Toulouse killer filmed himself killing the kids wearing one

In addition to the killing in Toulouse itself, I can’t help but think there is something wrong here. The Amazon ad, of course. The result of violence in films and video games mixed with the new trend of filming everything gets ugly. Fortunately those films were never released. For the record I love GoPro, it’s a great product, but the fact that it’s used in this case raises the bar in how humans can get ugly in a very new way.

Toulouse killer go pro Google Search



  • Kevin

    Nice opportunity.

  • http://www.thewayoftheweb.net Dan Thornton

    Ah, the problem of automated keyword advertising. The problem being that it’s set to appear whenever the brand name appears and noone has edited the negative keyword list.

    Something similar happened with a publication I worked on – http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/17/mcn_ad_gaffe/ – as soon as it was spotted the ad was removed, but there are countless examples of automated ad gaffes over the years

  • Mathieu

    Apparently Al-Jazeera (Paris) received the video by mail this morning.

    Definitely a bad press for GoPro.

  • http://twitter.com/glmwgr Guillaume Weeger

    Don’t shoot the messenger. 
    Bad people make bad things with good tools.
    Expect more trash considering the image quality, battery life and portability. 

  • John

    You are just making an even worse bad press about GoPro by reminding it here.

  • Trevor

    Amazon links to a ‘Hero Go Pro’, which technically isn’t in the GoPro product line up. It’s actually a ‘GoPro Hero’, ‘GoPro Hero HD’…etc. Kind of a caveat to automated advertising based on content in this case.

  • http://empoprise-bi.blogspot.com/ John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises)

    Dan, hopefully these automated scripts will become more robust so that they can determine when NOT to place an ad when the keyword is mentioned.

    There’s a larger issue at play here – when a crime is committed using camera X, or on social media service Y, or after listening to song Z, people are often inclined to blame the camera/social media service/song/whatever for the criminal act. It’s a depressing blame game…

  • http://www.loiclemeur.com/ Loic Le Meur

    I don’t think so, I think they wish they would have avoided that publicity.

  • http://www.thewayoftheweb.net Dan Thornton

    Hi John.
    The automated scripts will never be perfect – automation will never be adaptable enough to circumstances, and ad technology is still relatively basic – mostly it’s around keyword matching, and it would take manual intervention to intepret that you want an ad against every mention of GoPro, except for the mentions that also include the word Toulouse.
    In this case it’s a human/management failure that as soon as the link was made, it could have been added to the negative keywords list in Amazon, unless they actually don’t care…

    Sadly the blame game is human nature, so much harder to solve – we always default to wanting clear and simple reasons for why things happen.

  • CT

    This isn’t GoPro’s fault. This advertisement shows up whenever someone types in GoPro into Google. I assure you (from an internal source) that they DO NOT want to be showing advertisements on anything related to the shooting.

  • http://www.loiclemeur.com/ Loic Le Meur

    of course it’s not GoPro’s fault, I did not write or assumed it was their fault
    –
    Loic

    join us at LeWeb London June 19-20 and Paris dec 4-5-6 http://www.leweb.net