Spotted at The West. I believe the ad content rotates, so here’s a screenshot.
[description is below the cut]
There are many examples of serendipitously humorous or offensive ad placements. Many are probably difficult (though not impossible) to avoid in the general course of things, being third party ads, but this one isn’t a third-party ad.
Should advertisers consider context before placing their advertisements? Do we really need these “sexy” ads on articles about sexual violence? Any thoughts?
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Description: The article is headed “Woman ‘obeyed’ doctor after being drugged”. It’s the story of a current trial in which a family doctor is alleged to have visited a woman’s home after inserting an IUD into her, telling her that he was “unsured if he had installed the contraceptive device correctly”. It is alleged that he then gave her a deep sedative and sexually assaulted her.
The advertisement is a photograph of a heavily-lidded thin white woman in her late 20s. She is in a revealing gold evening dress, half leaning back in a red lounge chair, her dress falling open to expose her leg up to her hip. The text, “seven days”, refers to the West’s newspaper subscription service. It is not marked clearly as an advertisement, and it appears in a location that would typically be taken up by a photograph relevant to the article.
Grabbing somebody is Assault, and sexual touch makes it Sexual Assault. Stop minimising this. #rapeculture101 
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I used to work selling ad space… there is a small chance that the page planner, who saw the empty space had not been sold, had an old fashioned type of computerised page planner which just shows spaces as blocks of colour (looks almost like tetris) and didn’t realise what the inhouse ad was going next to… unlikely but small possibility.
But even if that was the case you’d have thought someone would have taken a look at the first proof and thought “hang on a minute here”.
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I’ve seen a couple of other examples of this too, usually so very offensive/poor taste that the only possible explanation is that no-one put 2 + 2 together before sending the page. This being an house ad it’s pretty disappointing, but that space is usually used for that kind of content on when the story on the page doesn’t have a pic, ie the blogs pointer.
I don’t know much about webdesign, but I wonder if there is some way to mark a web story sensitive so the system automatically knows to not allow any ads to appear next to it, house or otherwise. Something along the lines of sexual assault or crimes against children might be tagged as such.
I used to work for a subsidary of the West and can assure you that they’re all just idiots. No-one ever pays attention to these things, and most wouldn’t see it as an issue should it be brought up.
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I have seen a couple of crackers like this too… and it is extremely jarring, not to mention extremely offensive for the victim or her family to come across. I think all publications should be capable of marking certain stories as sensitive and requiring an additional step in supervision for the accompanying advertisement.
Even though this is a story about sexual assault because we live in a sexist patriarchal society that blames the victim continually they probably did not see the add as in the least bit problematic.
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