Huishan, my friend and NTU student emailed NTU’s corporate communications department to find out their side of the story and here’s an excerpt:
NTU had bought into the search engine’s Sponsored Links with keyword search. When one does a search using one of the keywords, a link to NTU marked “sponsored link” will appear. The descriptor should be “NTU Official Site” or “Study in Singapore” and not what appeared in the printed-screen above. There is no intention to mislead. The underlined descriptor above the ntu website address should not bear the SMU name; but names like “NTU Official Site” or “Study in Singapore”. The title of the sponsored link observed in your screen capture on Thursday evening was due to a feature of the search engine known as ‘dynamic ad copy’. When a user typed in eg. ‘SMU Singapore’, the search engine automatically generated ‘SMU Singapore’ as the title of our sponsored link. This resulted in the screen that you emailed us on Thursday.
Full story can be found here.
While NTU did take a week to reply, at least they did reply and not wait until it appeared in the newspapers. So I’ll give them credit for that. Unfortunately I think most of the blogosphere has moved on in a week, and people not keeping up with the issue anymore may not read this update, and just continue to maintain the impression of NTU based on the fiasco.
March 26, 2008 at 10:42 am |
[...] NTU Replies To The SMU = NTU Ad (Finally) [...]
March 26, 2008 at 11:09 am |
if anyone knows how google adwords works, then this is not something new/strange.
March 26, 2008 at 10:37 pm |
@malique: I don’t disagree. But a problem inherent in the tool does not mean the user is less meticulous does it?
March 27, 2008 at 10:25 am |
Hi, I’m a student from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication & Information and I’m writing an article about this for the Nanyang Chronicle (a paper from NTU).
I was hoping that you would be able to drop me an email so I can get your comments on this issue.
Your reply would be sincerely appreciated.
Many thanks!