Grisly advertising

I was all in favor of the media's right to photograph and publish pictures of dead bodies in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but then I found a page at the LA Times website that has some pretty bad ad targeting.  The page had a photo of a corpse floating next to a house, and the animated ad right underneath showed a close-up of a Cheerio floating in milk with the caption, "Think of it as your life preserver."  Before I could fully process what was happening, I clicked reload and got the same photo with an ad for "Corpse Bride: Rising to the Occasion".

Ok, that's just wrong.

I reloaded a few more times, took some screenshots and posted them here.  The original LA Times page is here, but it may be down by the time you get to it.

I still believe in the media's right (perhaps even obligation) to publish these kinds of photos, but they need to take serious responsibility for how such content is going to be presented.  A few companies ago, I worked as an engineer on the first-ever online ad system, and we spent quite a long time thinking about how to prevent exactly this kind of offensive targeting.  There are many approaches, but the best one by far is the one we recommended to our first online newspaper client in 1996: when you publish particularly disturbing stories or photographs, turn off all advertising on those pages.  The people in the photos, your readers and your advertisers deserve better.