Tourism NT uses “Abo” as paid search term

What a conflict! PPC or PC? I guess PPC won this time. Seems like an opportunity tourism NT could have taken a miss on. Tisk Tisk.

I guess they didn’t expect the DKI to pass it through as the headline of the ad…

I wonder who first discovered this?

Someone’s getting fired…

If someone types in the word ‘abo’ would you rather they are delivered to a website supporting appropriate aboriginal related content or a race hate website which could be the other option…………..

You have to really wonder… their analytics must have suggested a whole bunch of words for them and they have just ticked accept all… *oops*, my bad…

nice spotting Brett!

What is Brett doing searching ‘abo’ in google anyway?

Too much political correctness. Next you’ll have someone shouting Aussie is a racist and derogatory term. Common sense is dead, long live common sense.

I guess you have to walk a fine line between driving traffic to your site by going after the relevant key words, and encouraging their use by doing so. Like it or not, “Abo” is a relevant keyword for the site, just because it’s ignorant people are using it doesn’t mean that the site isn’t what they are looking for.

I try to assume the best of people before making rash conclusions and certainly before publishing an article without getting feedback from people who’s throats you’re jumping down. Has anyone considered it might have been a move to catch a number of spelling options and misspellings e.g. aborigine, aboriginal, aboridginee, aborijinal, etc? How about getting a response before making inflammatory remarks?

I’m confused; it may stem from cultural misunderstanding but isn’t “Abo” just an abbreviation for Aboriginal? like Jew for a Jewish person. Jew isn’t derogatory.

This is political correctness gone mad. Crossing off Next Digital from my list next time I need such a service.

Searching abo or abos and you also bring up Wikipedia hits as first results. It’s not as bad as made out, Wikipedia listing ‘abo’ as a ‘once casual’ term.

I’m sick and tired of the media not doing any investigative reporting and simply being reactionary and making whinging news – which is also very cheap to produce. This is not the fault of mUmBRELLA, this is the place for media & marketing discussion, but in the wider, mass-media is where my big beef lies.

Did they also have Flagon, Goon, Bogan, Sh*thole..etc?

It is relevant term to include in their campaign but using keyword insertion so it features is where they have gone wrong.

So who is looking for clients? Brett..you typed it..racist is as racist does. Also could not agree more with Jo

In the Google results it contains a section for “See results for: Aboriginal”. Could this be something as innocuous as Google acknowledging the relationship and delivering AdWord hits based on it, presenting them as a hit for the original term? Certainly a search for “computres” suggests I might mean “computers” and returns a bunch of AdWord-targeted results.

I just typed “abo” into Google and it refers to “ABO Blood Group System”

Clearly they are targetting health tourists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.....oup_system

maybe they’re talking about the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra?

I didn’t even know Abo was a racist term until I moved here to Aus. As most words are shortened by Aussies, it would be natural for tourists from outside of Australia to assume Abo is not racist, just the shortening of Aboriginal

I’d wager that this isn’t incompetence or malice at all.

When you bid for something on google using broad or advanced match it’ll show your ad on queries that it thinks is related to the concept of your ad.

They were probably buying “aboriginal” or “aboriginal culture” and the matching technology (not ureasonably, it’s just an algorithm, it doesn’t make value judgements unless someone builds a constraint on it) thought “abo” was a related term.

If you look at the google search results for “abo” you’ll see that it’s a query that may be about a few different things according to Google – the ABO blood group system etc. It’s just a mistake and there’s no real need to blow it out of proportion. Everyone who has ever used google adwords has made this mistake, just not in such a public and wrong.com way.

why is abo an offensive term? Geez, you can tell that there’s been a real market slowdown – we have nothing better to do than sit and make stories out of google search words…..

Slow news day mumbrella?

Firstly I don’t get NT ads with “abo”, only with “aboriginal”. Maybe they already fixed it?

Secondly is it possible that this issue occurred due to some fuzzy logic within Google? (Similar to when it suggests alternate or corrected spellings of search terms).

My first thought is that the ads are being served based on substring matching. “abo” is the first three letters of several variations of relevant keywords and typos of keywords, seems more likely to be a boring technicality than an intentional effort.

“Abo” is an offensive and derogatory word. Shame on you for calling it too much political correctness! How about from now on, the “indancurry” user is referred to as a stupid curry-munching f*ckwit? Oh don’t be offended now, after all, it’s just common sense.

Reminds me of my experience in the 1970s when a subtitle “Abo. spokesman” popped up as a subtitle on an ABC-TV program. I complained to Aunty who replied – in all seriousness – that “Aboriginal” wouldn’t fit. I didn’t bother to tell them that they could have tried smaller type but, thankfully, I never saw “Abo” again.

Mikey – that’s out of line, for someone replying to attempt to starnd up for political correctness your blatantly racist response speaks volumes…

Yep, on my first search, from about 35,500,000 results “The ABO blood group system is the most important blood type system (or blood group system) in human blood transfusion.” (Wikipedia).

Or it could be Australian Brandenburg Orchestra (www.brandenburg.com.au).

As an aside, I love Wikipedia.

Abo may refer to:
ABO blood group system, a human blood type and blood group system
ABO (gene), enzyme encoded by the ABO gene that determines the ABO blood group of an individual
Abo of Tiflis (c.756–786), an Arab East Orthodox Catholic saint
Adaptive Binary Optimization (ABO), an image compression algorithm
Indigenous Australians, as the offensive (once casual) term “abo”
Ābo, the anglicized Japanese name for the Pokémon Ekans
Bankon language, also known as Abo, Abaw, Bo, Bon
American Board of Optometry, a licencing and certification foundation for Opticians and optical providers. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abo)

Yes 🙂

“What is Brett doing searching ‘abo’ in google anyway?”

“If someone types in the word ‘abo’ would you rather they are delivered to a website supporting appropriate aboriginal related content or a race hate website which could be the other option…………..”

The old offensiveness of this word has passed into history. It has plenty of common usage amongst kooris, oops indigenous people, and whites in close contact with them. It can depend upon the individuals and the context of course but it’s become a bit tongue in cheek, in the way you might dare to call a girl a sheila for a minor stir. It’s not a big deal.

Who cares…? Don’t see what the big deal is here.

This is most likely the result of an automated bid/keyword management system. I dislike such systems because they enable lazy advertisers to do stupid things more quickly and in greater quantity.

Regardless of politics, the term ‘abo’ would make a poor keyword for Tourism NT on a pure search marketing basis. Not only is ‘abo’ ambiguous (to most of the world, it refers to blood types), it offers an almost unintelligible connection between searcher expectation (‘common language’) and site content (‘brand language’). What you end up with is a term that would drive expensive, untargeted traffic with a high bounce propensity.

Even if ‘abo’ were a PC term, it would be a bad keyword.

Which comes back to the automated system problem. The example is a generic ad with ‘Abo’ dynamically inserted into the title. Most certainly, no human would have even seen this – it’s set-and-forget advertising that relies on machine interpretation of natural language for ignorant clients with a large budget (i.e. the government).

It’s a shame to see tax dollars being spent with such little oversight.

Great pick up by Brett – being an SEM manager for a number of years I have seen similar incidents like this (unfortunate as they may be) – it ain’t the worst and the SEM agency has done well by picking it up and adding the word as a negative

Your terms – abo – do not have enough search volume to show graphs.

Bored of the racial too and fro’ing now…but on topic I really want to visit the NT after seeing this: http://tinyurl.com/yegbepb
Tourism NT could have a whole new target market for tours

Have you ever tried to spell Abodiginal? It ain’t easy

Awesome response by Judd… Bang on point!

Two concerns: one, I find this hard to believe. How do you know someone else might not have set this up in an attempt to discredit them

In the event that it is linked to their Adwords account, could be a case of Google or a third party program suggesting related keywords and someone simply hitting “select all” without actually looking at the list. A level of blame to be sure, but I’d find it hard to believe that they’d be that stupid as to type it in themselves as a keyword.

I blame South Australia.

Anyone who suggests that the word Abo is not offensive is a complete idiot, but we know that this was an accident. Poor technology. Maybe even an idiot or as per usual an inexperienced teen at the wheel, but not intentional and they should not be treated as if they are serial killers.

Does anyone have the name and contact number for the person at NT Tourism who looks after their search?

Tell our indigenous friends to get a life

Well this has definitely polarized many but there’s two debates going on here…

Firstly, whether the term is derogatory or not. I happen to think based on my experience with its use in Australia that it is, though I understand others may not agree.

The second, is around the actual implementation… There’s no doubt Google’s DKI and the keyword match type are involved, which looks extremely bad for Tourism NT… I’d love to hear their response.

People do make mistakes and the important thing is we learn from them.

For anyone interested I was actually searching for another government body whose acronym differs by one letter.

Pretty damn lazy on ABC’s part – lumping Abo in with other search terms and leaving an auto keyword title replace ad. Reeks of too much automation.

Not to mention the obvious: what person searching Abo wants to experience Aboriginal culture? Quality marketing right there.

I agree we do sometimes get too PC, but in this case, it’s fair enough to suggest that this needs to be removed.

The reason why is simply that Aboriginal people don’t like being called Abo, especially by non-Aboriginals. I’ve seen it before and we (well, anyone who’s been in Oz long enough) can probably imagine it being received negatively by Aboriginals anyway.

@ Ben – couldn’t agree more. If it’s deemed a relevant keyword, by all means use it to attract people searching for that term, but don’t repeat it in the ad.

I suspect this is a case of carelessness on Tourism NTs part. All they need to do is change or remove it (seems like they already have), apologise to anyone that directly expresses offense taken, and move on.

WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!??!??1

And now this article is ranking number 3 for the same term. This is Google’s “freshness of content” algorithm at work. Google also taking signals from inbound links to the article and no doubt social media chatter too.

CJ. Would you have made such a brazen statement using your real name? I thought not. Coward.

You’d have to be living under a rock to not know that Aboriginal people don’t like being called ‘abo’.

It’s always been a pejorative term so cries of ‘political correctness’ are unjustified.

I too hope that this is just an oversight on Tourism NT’s part.

You’d think Google’s suggested keywords for paid ads would actually be words that companies would confidently want to be associated with.

Four hours later and still no comment from Tourism NT. Seems to me if this was a simple mistake they’d have said something by now.

Well thanks to this article, Tourism NT are now ranking naturally for “abo”, so they no longer need to pay for the ad. Good SEO work!

Did the marketing person select ‘Abo’ or did Google?

When you search for ‘Abo’ Google says ‘Did you mean Aboriginal’, so I suggest that Google will also give this suggestion to you when purchasing adwords or vice versa… It could be a very honest mistake when picking adwords and selecting other keywords to use in the campaign that Google reommends…

Who would search for Abo anyway and why? Mind you I bet people search for Pom, Bogan, Ranga and all sorts dont they… lets face it habits are never PC. Are marketeers allowed to target societies habits?

C’mon guys, worse things are happening in the world than to worry something like this.

The Aged has picked up on this very webpage now. Rather passé by now, but then this is media outlet that made a big deal out of what a only few hundred twitter users saw at the time (Catherine Deveny tweets)

@ Mia

“You’d have to be living under a rock to not know that Aboriginal people don’t like being called ‘abo’.”

My Aunty lives under a rock in Coober Pedy and she says it’s very nice.

by saying the word aboriginal,you are classing yourself as not of this continent, AB MEANS NON IN LATIN,JUST LIKE SAYING ABNORMAL,ABSTRACT,AND SO FORTH, AND IT’S THE ABNORMALITY OF A WHITE MAN THINKING!!!

The internal NT geek responsible for the SEO probably thought ABO was a wise choice – in the NT (and a lot of other places) it’s sadly pretty common.

This is just Google “broad-matching” a term that is incomplete (i.e Aboriginal), in its system’s viewpoint.

* Search for “toyot” and you’ll be servered with Toyota search ads
* Search for “metho” and you’ll be served with cleaning solvent search ads

Google gets paid when users click on PPC ads, so it’s going to presume a user meant a correct search term wherever possible to increase impressions of ads, and thus clicks, and thus revenue.

Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance … or computers, or commerce.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon’s_razor

NT Tourism should say sorry

Brett Nicholson, frankly, is an idiot. I am so tired of smug self-righteous whiteys thinking they are protecting the sensibilities of poor black folk by carping about pathetic irrelevancies, and in doing so, inflaming unnecessary racial tension and diverting focus from the serious issues like aborignial health, justice, and a full inclusive apology to all indigenous Australians. Rod is very right. There are many valid reasons why anyone with tech competancy might have included the abbreviation ‘abo’. I see nothing at all racist is what Nicholson ‘discovered’, but plenty that is disturbing about him having trumpeted about it. Wake up, Nicholson, Next Digital should sack you.

I have to agree, if anything at all, this post from Nicholson has merely highlighted his ignorance of Google, resorting to sensationalism when on reflection it’s easy to see how Tourism NT are innocent in all this, and it’s simply a side effect of Google’s relationship engine.

Beyond the line and behind the act.

Is this really any more racist than calling all British people Poms or Kiwi’s sheep shaggers? Telling Irish Jokes or saying that all Tasmanians are inbred?? Where do we stop with generically labelling races???

Do you get offended when you are overseas and someone calls you skippy, tells you to bowl them a tinny under arm or to show them your manacle marks?

Perhaps you have a point, Mumbrella – but if what we’re suggesting is correct then the people responsible for the AdWords (in this case, the responsibility appears to lie with MPG) seemingly have a higher level of diligence required than they may have previously realised.

Perhaps such agencies will now need to maintain a blacklist of words they don’t want a brand associated, as well as a whitelist of words they do, and ensure that the brand is not associated with those keywords – something that it certainly seems (given ‘abo’ no longer references Tourism NT) that Google is capable of doing.

A lesson for all agencies, and perhaps another entry for Brett’s blog?

Newspapers know enough about online marketing to have been able to pick this boring technical issue for what it was. They chose not to let a good headline get in the way of the truth.

Now every indigenous Australian who checks their email or picks up a newspaper today will have to think about racism again. What a waste of a good day.

Tim – if you are justifying your publishing of the story on the grounds of imcompetence rather than racism, why didn’t your story mention the media company who placed them on behalf of Tourism NT, or how automated adword campaigns are generated. Admit it, you jumped on the headline like everyone else.

I typed in ‘coon’ then clicked ‘i’m feeling lucky’. Imagine my shock and disgust when I was directed to a cheese website.

I use ABO all the time when I meet foreign born Aussies; its an abbr for ‘Australian Born Overseas’. Breath in, breath out.

How did Brett even find that?! Nice spot!

won’t somebody please think of the children

@ mikey 11 May 10 2:26 pm – I am replying just to get something off my chest. Here’s to you, a boorish, self smug, narcissist – get out and have some real education in the big wide world and then talk about political correctness, you racist pig. I have seen enough of the world to be taken in by your stupid outburst …

As mentioned by Tom, this ad has most likely been served due to using broad match and therefore should not fuel an attack at the NT Tourism for being politically incorrect or their agency for being incompetent.

Wow! Some ignorant comments here. The reason it is not acceptable is because it reinforces that ‘derogatory word’ as an appropriate description. It says to anyone searching for Aboriginal culture, that even tourism accepts this lazy offensive word. Hell!! If it gets more hits, why not? Right?

idiots.