Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Reply from the school.

I know the whole SMU = NTU ad thingy is so yesterday's news.

But the school just replied me. Here it is:

" Dear Hui Shan (they never spell my name correctly! It's Huishan. Not Hui Shan!)

Thank you for alerting us to this matter. Sorry for the late reply as we wanted to make a thorough investigation.

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.

We alerted our advertising agency on Thu night (20 March 2008) to investigate and rectification was completed at about 10.30pm on the same night. We have since made checks and there is no further occurrence of the unintended descriptor. SMU has also been informed and updated accordingly the next day, on Good Friday. They have accepted our explanation.

Regards
Patrick Ang"

They contacted SMU? Hmm. Nothing much to say about it. But yeah.

OH! The people in this department probably didn't attend communication class. SERIOUSLY! I will not talk about it.

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