Vizi considers filing a criminal complaint against Oridian over bad ads
Many of you may have been subjected lately to malware or adult ads, on web sites you would normally not expect any such things. Hell, you may have even sent out angry emails complaining how you were subjected to such ads, causing you either embarassment or concern over the safety of your computer.
I was, just as you, puzzled as to where these ads came from. Especially when it comes of major publishers serving ads from literally hundreds of networks, it’s really impossible in most cases to isolate a single ad creative and figure out what network has served it and who the advertiser was. To my relief – and somewhat of a surprise – I’ve recently received updates from Vizi, one of the ad networks that serves ads on some of the properties I look after. According to Vizi, the culprit is another ad network, Oridian.
First update, February 11:
“In the last week we had several issues of banners that were going things that they shouldn’t. We tracked down the campaigns from several companies that were using Yahoo’s RightMedia exchange, and turned those campaigns off. Because of this issue, we have banned on Vizi all third party tags from other companies, meaning that no one can run ads that are from third parties on our network anymore without us knowing about it directly.“
That didn’t tell me much but it was still good to hear that somebody may be getting to the bottom of it. Early today (I’m on GMT, by the way), a second update from Vizi informed us that:
Second update, February 12:
“As you know, there have been issues with our adveritsing tags for the last week that has caused issues.
We have taken care of these issues as of this morning, after much investigation. The problems were caused by a network company called Oridian out of Israel that we have worked together with for over 5 years — they had inserted ads that caused webpages to be directed to FLING.com.
We have decided to stop working with them permanently and are considering filling a criminal complaint against them for doing this, if they do not answer questions about this, and the advertiser who did this.“
Needless to say, I’ve taken down all Oridian tags and am still waiting for an apology from them – not that this is going to come anytime soon, if ever.
To conclude: seeing bad ads on your websites? Don’t let them sit there and hope the leprechauns will make them go away – contact all your networks with as much information you can (URLs, screenshots, copies of the text if it’s an ad creative) and demand that the issue is looked into. Be vocal, if needed – such issues normally take time and efforts to be tracked down, and some ad networks are reluctant to work on your issue without some sort of “incentive”.
UPDATE: Oridian Replies
