Oh The Irony: Rick Santorum Banner Ads Appearing on Poker Site

GOP Presidential candidate Rick Santorum is opposed to pornography, contraception, heavy metal music and most forms of gambling, especially the Web kind, yet shockingly his banners began appearing on the popular TwoPlusTwo.com poker forum in recent weeks, right along side a thread questioning why members of that forum should be asked to support someone who supports Internet poker prohibition (which is precisely what the tower banner we saw was asking the forum community to do).   

TwoPlusTwo.com, like many Internet-based companies, utlizes an ad network on portions of its website.  Such networks pull up banners for various companies and organizations randomly. 

That said, websites on both sides of the spectrum are typically provided with the option to turn down specific advertisements.  Obviously, a church-based organization would not want to feature adult entertainment banners on their website and likewise, the folks behind Viagra would not want to advertise on sites targeting those under 21 (i.e. Mr. Bean and Justin Beiber fan dedicated Web ventures). 

Indeed, the organization in charge of placing the “Support Santorum” banner ads (and we cannot confirm if Santorum’s campaign itself is behind such a campaign), should have full control over what type of websites such banner ads appear.  Obviously, the Santorum camp would object to their banner ads showing up on, say, a website dealing with female contraception. 

Spanish language Dominos Pizza ads were popping up for those residing in the state of California even though the individuals seeing said advertisements spoke English as their first language.  An ad for gun brokers also appeared with quite a number of threads dealing with the topic of "poker game holdups". 

In the case of Evidon, the network providing banners to TwoPusTwo.com, viewers may be seeing banners that are based on past online activity.  In other words, banners being displayed might be a result of those dastardly little cookies that attach to one's own personal computer hard drive. 

From the Evidon website: 

Evidon empowers consumers and businesses to see, understand and control data online.  With insights fueled by its Ghostery browser extension and rich, 800+ company privacy database, Evidon enables businesses to assess the cookies and other tracking activity on their websites, helping them to protect their audience data and improve performance.

Dig deeper and you will note the "Support Santorum" site is referred via Value Click, a company that provides Internet advertising solutions for publishers of web sites and online advertisers, focusing on cost-per-click platforms. 

This reporter can confirm, however, that he has never logged onto a site related to pizza or gun shopping.  Likewise, Yours Truly has never logged onto the Rick Santorum official website.  That isn't to say I haven't search for information related to "Rick Santorum".

Some banner programs from the past had to be retooled as they would reflect the subject of a particular story.  For example, a news story about body parts being discovered in a briefcase would yield text ads along side said article for suitcase manufacturers. 

It is a sticky situation for "Support Santorum" ads to appear on gambling websites and, God only knows where else. 

One poster noted:  “The irony of Rick Santorum paying to advertise on 2+2 is far too much fun to ever risk stopping it.”

Rick Santorum in a recent interview had this to say: 

“I’m someone who takes the opinion that gaming is not something that is beneficial, particularly having that access on the Internet. Just as we’ve seen from a lot of other things that are vices on the Internet, they end to grow exponentially as a result of that. It’s one thing to come to Las Vegas and do gaming and participate in the shows and that kind of thing as entertainment; it’s another thing to sit in your home and have access to that it. I think it would be dangerous to our country to have that type of access to gaming on the Internet.

“Freedom’s not absolute. What rights in the Constitution are absolute? There is no right to absolute freedom. There are limitations. You might want to say the same thing about a whole variety of other things that are on the Internet — “let everybody have it, let everybody do it.” No. There are certain things that actually do cost people a lot of money, cost them their lives, cost them their fortunes that we shouldn’t have and make available, to make it that easy to do.”

TwoPlusTwo.com’s primary target audience is made up mostly of individuals who gamble over the Internet. 

Oddly enough, this isn’t just a fly-by-night thing, as the first post on the subject of Santorum ads appearing on a poker portal appeared February 3.

- Jagajeet Chiba, Gambling911.com