If you bought the space and round of ads, you just got to run with it, but if you deem them as having adult content… that's a totally different story. You might have the right to be silent and banned if you take the courageous step.

This was learned firsthand by the US lingerie company Pampered Passions, who found its ads not displayed on the European market. Guess they shouldn't have checked that "mature content" box when describing the campaign and ads, huh? Pampered Passions invites men to buy lingerie for their loved ones for the holidays, but I guess they showed too much skin for Google and the "censorship" stepped in.

A Google representative said that "The ad has been disapproved for adult content. Only family safe images will be approved. Images which are classified as non-family safe or adult content are disapproved and will not run. Your image contains nudity and mature themes." That was enough for the lingerie company and they immediately tried to get all the publicity possible from this ban. They responded with a statement in a press release that said that "Google's refusal to show ads that are completely acceptable to UK audiences on their network is turning out to be an increasingly frequent occurrence. Google are an American company and while they might seem to be really 'cool' and 'liberal' in the USA, their policies do seem rather conservative for European consumers. An outright ban on ads no ruder than a Christmas cracker joke & featuring less flesh than a swimwear catalogue seems pretty 'uncool' to us."

Of course, it is possible that Pampered Passions only started the campaign knowing that it would be banned, in order to catch the public attention. Google is the proverbial sheep with golden wool when it comes to this, as some know. Being the biggest thing on the Internet does that to you.