Whilst checking that my flat would still be standing by the time I get home, I spotted a couple of ads incorporating the London riots into their PPC advertising earlier today:

As you can see, whilst an ad for P&O Ferries used the London riots as a reason to try and entice people to get away from it all; Fresh Holidays went even further, exclaiming that their prices were “worth rioting about!”. As a side note, it’s worth noting that this isn’t P&O Ferries main domain, so we’re not sure if this is an affiliate site or a microsite for P&O themselves.

We wanted to work out whether these ads were IP targeted to London (and other hotspots) alone, but they stopped appearing before we could fully test this…

What do you think?

Whilst we are always fans of topical PPC advertising, we’re not too sure if this is crossing the line into insensitivity. We had a poll asking for your opinons - see the results below.

Results

As promised, see results from our poll below:

As you can see, opinion was divided with 50% of voters hating it, and 34% loving it - much like our own office where we couldn't decide what we thought!

Check back soon for more examples of topical PPC, as well as new Google AdWords and Analytics features!

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