Archive for the ‘offensive material’ Category

Largest ever spam penalty handed out in New Zealand

Tuesday, March 4th, 2014
Photo credit; epSos .de on Flickr

Photo credit; epSos .de on Flickr

Auckland company Image Marketing Group (IMG) has been ordered to pay $99,610 in the largest ever penalty imposed for sending spam in New Zealand, last month.

The Department of Internal Affairs said the penalty was imposed at the Auckland High Court under the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act.

IMG sent a total of 519,545 messages to New Zealand e-mail addresses in December 2009, and the following year IMG conducted 21 email campaigns that promoted sales of the company’s database products. The company also sent 44,824 text messages from an Australian mobile number to New Zealand mobile phone users over a period of a month in 2009, said a statement from the department.

“IMG must now stop sending any further spam to New Zealand electronic addresses. This is a clear win for consumers who are sick and tired of receiving unwanted messages via email or texts,” team leader electronic messaging compliance Toni Demetriou said in the statement.

IMG had admitted breaching the Act and the penalties included a discount for IMG’s admissions and co-operation.

To read more about this story, click here.

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Posted in E-mail & the internet, email, New Zealand, new zealand business, offensive material | No Comments »

New Zealand carpet company horrified at online advertising gaff

Wednesday, September 11th, 2013

A New Zealand carpet company was appalled that its online advertisements had been running on a social media site associate with a rash of teen suicides.

The site, ask.fm, is aimed at insecure teenagers, who are encouraged to ask anonymous questions. But, showing social media’s dark potential, the site has attracted trolls who post spiteful comments on the site in response to the questions.

Ads from New Zealand’s Cavalier Bremworth were running on the site, prompting the company to request that Google cease running their ads on it.

Company spokeswoman Desiree Keown says the company’s media agency briefed Google on where to place its ads, but it was obviously ignored.

“I was alerted late yesterday afternoon and we asked immediately, our media agency contacted Google immediately to ask them to take it down.”

She says: “We were not happy at all to be associated with a website like this.

“It’s not a good look and obviously we were very concerned to have it removed immediately.”

To read more on this story, click here.

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Posted in Google, New Zealand, new zealand business, offensive material, online marketing, social media, social networking | No Comments »

YouTube the secret home of smoking ads

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Tobacco companies have spent a lot of time and money into researching how to get around the World Health Organisation 2005 ban on cigarette advertising, affecting several countries.

One such way around the advertising ban appears to be YouTube.  An Otago University study that looked into 5 major cigarette brands, found that at least 71% of the videos were supportive of smoking or normalised smoking.  Furthermore, users didn’t have to directly search for smoking, but instead it would be paired up with other search terms, such as Marlboro cigarettes appearing in searches for Harley Davidson bikes.

The study found that YouTube doesn’t consider pro-tobacco content as offensive material, so these clips remain on the site.  However, that does not prevent the public from requesting that these videos be removed under the present rules.

The article reports that in New Zealand, the Government had shown it was not willing to put the legal resources to deal with examples of indirect tobacco marketing.

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Posted in anti-smoking, lobbying, offensive material, YouTube | No Comments »