The world’s #1 retailer advertised DVD titles for sale on the world’s #1 BitTorrent tracker site.
In a fateful twist of irony, the worlds leading legal “low price leader,” teamed up with the world’s leading illegal “low-price leader” to hawk its DVDs.
Now I personally gave up on The Pirate Bay years ago, the selection and seeder to leecher ratio being inconsistent and spotty at best but, apparently Wal-Mart has been quietly placing banner ads on the site.
According to Variety, several Wal-Mart advertisements have appeared on The Pirate Bay recently, no doubt much to the chagrin of the MPAA, RIAA, and others who loathe its offering of pirated content.
It seems that it has placed ads mainly targeting sales of specific DVD titles, which include the eight season of “The Simpsons,” “The Sopranos,” “Smallville,” “Desperate Housewives” and the movie “Office Space.”
A group called “Wal-Mart Watch” reported that most of the ads were placed during this past holiday season, from November to December, in order to lure customers into making Christmas gift-giving purchases.
Now in looking through The Pirate Bay site I could not locate any of these Wal-Mart ads, the story no doubt causing the retailer to quickly scramble to have them removed.
In any event, I’m sure the MPAA didn’t raise too much of a fuss with Wal-Mart considering it is the largest source of their annual DVD sales, and with it’s ongoing battle with online piracy I don’t think they want to rock the boat.
In its defense, it appears that Wal-Mart was using Targetpoint, an Israeli online ad agency that serves ads to match targeted search queries, to generate these ads, and it is unclear how much knowledge they had of the situation.
But, it does make you wonder how many DVDs Wal-Mart did sell using the prominent BitTorent tracker site as its backdrop. Those are some figures I’d like to see.
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Depends maybe wallmart didn’t place them rather a marketing agency did.
“In its defense it appears that Wal-Mart was using Targetpoint an Israeli online ad agency that serves ads to match targeted search queries to generate these ads and it is unclear how much knowledge they had of the situation.”
Thats crafty. And…. sacrilege. if they are now using the p2p world to advertise would i have to look at this as wal-mart supporting or opposing? their advertisements on torrent sites could be viewed as supportive. but at the same time it may lure users back to stores. all i can say is that i thought i was confused BEFORE….. O.o