We decided to experiment with using Google AdWords to promote Medical School 2020, our book about what it is like to attend medical school.
Here are excerpts from an email that we received:
Ad Text:
Thinking about Medical School?
Learn what it is like.
Follow our anonymous hero through four years. One chapter every week.
http://fifthchance.com/MedicalSchool2020Ad Status: Disapproved
Ad Issue(s): Unapproved substances====================
Disapproval Reason
====================
Unapproved substances: Ads aren’t allowed to promote certain unapproved substances, irrespective of any claims of legality. This includes promotion of products containing or related to ephedra.
The text does contain the names of some drugs, including “heroin” and “opioids” and “oxycodone.” But I hope that most human readers would consider this part of a discussion regarding opiates rather than a promotion of opiates!
Could it be that our robot overlords don’t want humans talking about these issues?
Related:
More likely a false positive in a context where too many false positives are preferable to even a few false negatives. They probably aren’t very good keywords or ad text anyways because they are likely to generate too many expensive clicks from people who aren’t at all interested in buying your book.
The text of the book contains a handful of drug-related words. The text of the AD certainly did not!