Major brands’ ads feature on racist Aboriginal meme page
Ads from major Australian brands including Foxtel, Subway, CommBank, Westfield, accountancy firm ITP, Destination NSW, and railway service The Ghan have been appearing on a site which generates racist aboriginal memes. Among the online ad networks serving the ads is Google’s.
Memegenerator.net/aboriginal appears to have been the source of images that populated a controversial Facebook page which last night had its offensive content deleted after generating a national outcry.
The jokes include reference to petrol sniffing, alcohol problems and joblessness among aboriginal people.
Various advertisers also appear on porn sites and various other sites that Mumbrella may deem offensive – it’s the nature of internet advertising much of the time. Two days ago, Meme generator was a website to capture a large young audience, today it’s a website that Mumbrella deems offensive – it’s difficult to control.
Plus Meme generator is about playing up to dumb stereotypes, it’s part of the (limited) humour of it all – some may find it offensive, yes, but it’s not illegal and is not particularly offensive, it’s the same stuff you overhear in dodgy pubs across the country.
But if you are going to (pointlessly) report on this, then get reporting on these equally “offensive” pages and see what advertisers feature on them!
http://memegenerator.net/Cunning-Black-Strategist
http://memegenerator.net/The-Irrational-Black-Man
http://memegenerator.net/Dumb-Blonde
http://memegenerator.net/Irrational-Black-Woman
http://memegenerator.net/black-woman
http://memegenerator.net/Sassy-Black-Woman
http://memegenerator.net/Educated-Black-Woman
http://memegenerator.net/Successful-Black-Man
http://memegenerator.net/Educated-Black-Woman
http://memegenerator.net/Sassy-Gay-Friend
http://memegenerator.net/Gay-Dating-Site-Member
Or, you know, you could not waste your time on this.
I’m sure the world’s penguin populations are offended by the Socially Awkward Penguin Meme too
Your article is wrong. The website does *NOT* generate racist aboriginal memes. It is a meme generation site – just like Google Docs is a document generation site.
Do racists use Google Docs generating racist hate? I’m sure they do.
Considering that news.com.au seems to mainly republish stuff they found on reddit.com & reuters.com – it seems a bit cheeky for them to complain about what seems to be half the content of reddit ….
Mac
Nice try at writing a controversial piece, but I agree with Mac, Matt and Seahorses – it’s a meme site, let’s give it a term for journalists who have no understanding of it, such as: “User Generated Comedy”. There are many, many sites of this kind all over the internet, some of them highly respected and supported with advertisements and venture capital money, including the Cheezburger Network and Reddit.
Like all Comedy, some is poor, some is racist, some is anti-racist. Almost every meme on this site is an attempt at satire – and as such, can and might cross the boundaries. 99% of it is relatively innocent and much funnier than the product of most creative departments.
To suggest that it’s improper to advertise on them because some of the humour goes over the line? Move along, nothing to see here…
I will back Mumbrella here for pointing out that leading brands are affiliating themselves with racism online. I think that point is definitely worthy of focus.
Indeed I would hazard a guess, that many of the agencies and marketing teams for these brands were not aware that their advertisement was being featured on pages such as these.
Whether meme sites should be allowed to generate racist content (I am not going to attempt to answer that.) Should agencies and marketing teams have tighter controls and be far more stringent on where their brand is viewed online? You betcha!
Fragmented digital media can evidently be hard to control.
If Commbank or Subway took out an advert in a print magazine, which featured offensive racial cartoons, published by a far right organisation and not affiliated with any publishing standards – I am sure there would be an “inquiry”.
Pointing out what other websites have socially unacceptable and offensive content does not cut it for me. As for comparing racist material to ‘Socially Awkward Penguin Meme’, well , for that I have no words.
It comes down to where you stand on the content as a person and as an advertiser you need to ensure your brand can not be associated with such content. It’s not easy but neither is it difficult, as digital media becomes a larger part of the mix, advertisers have to demand that their standards are met.
The part that’s missing here is that many of these ads were likely not explicitly targeted at memegenerator.net (let alone this particular page) but rather they were targeted at the author of this article.
This is were things are different to a controversial magazine placement. The magazine looks the same to all readers – online ads however vary wildly subject to who the visitor is. In my opinion, the association here was not with the content of the site but rather with the author (including his debatable appetite for inappropriate memes).
@gqwgzub
Good point sir. Cookies and display that follows you around. Nevertheless brands will still not be happy being associated with sites like these and I am sure that targeted display ad’s can be pulled from the meme generator sites, whether that be Google’s job to flick the switch, somebody will have to I guess?
This is a user generator site that offers a service of putting pictures with words.
You will find content that does not align with your brand on all UGC (which includes social media), why hasn’t anyone pointed out the large sums of racist/bigoted comments left on Youtube video comment sections?
I don’t see advertisers or ad-media going nuts/writing articles over pre-roll or display ads being featured on Youtube?
@Anon comment 9.
YouTube pages have definitely been referenced on here in the comments before (not this thread.)
People were mentioning how YouTube needs to take a stand. Imagine having racist profanities in the comment fields of SMH; they wouldn’t – why should YouTube?
I cant find the thread from before?