Q: Was this a bombcast advertisement?

At the beginning of Ep. 834 I got a 30-second ad for the US Concealed Carry Association claiming 'innocent gun owners' are being 'locked up every day'

Was this a Bombcast ad or was it injected by my player? (I use Pocketcasts). I'm bummed and really don't need a blast of politics before my video games. Anyone else getting this?

@fire0eater: I can absolutely confirm that this is not an ad that should be in the system and it has been reported to @dtoast, who is in agreement that this should be removed immediately.

@zombiepie: thanks for confirming!

Ooof, those conservative monster inserted ads seem to be able to sneak in there even after all the settings are set. I listen to another podcast that is largely hosted by trans people and somehow some anti-trans ad about high school sports got in there.

I kinda miss the days where all podcast ads were just read by the host, so you didn’t have to worry about some sketchy stuff slipped in by the algorithm.

Man, sucks that some wacko ads slip through sometimes.

Regional ad networks are so wild in America. I live in Canada, and across the Bombcast and other podcasts, the most “politically charged” ad I can ever recall was an inoffensive local teacher’s union ad saying like “we’re trying to teach your kids, please support us.” Never had any ads that raised my eyebrow.

yeah, i get some real garbage from programmatic ads.

kinda feels like they're poisoning the well with this stuff- my 'skip 30 seconds ahead' reflexes have never been sharper.

Are you telling me there isn't a "Hey, small business man." ad read for this?

This but also I get random French ads even though the part of Canada I'm from has only an extremely small subset of people who speak French beyond an extremely basic level, because apparently according to advertisers, "located in Canada" means that we all universally speak fluent English and French.

But on the main topic, yeah I've been hearing of this kind of thing happening a lot more recently in general for many podcasts I listen to. I'm not sure if it's advertisement buyers of certain types trying to game the system since they know their ad isn't desirable to be included on most podcasts (I would imagine tons of podcasts flag politics and gun ads as things to filter out of the potential ad pool), podcast providers relying too much on machine filtering to try to organize categories of ads, or some combo of the two, but this does seem to be happening a lot more the last year or two. Other podcasts I listen to have been running into this problem too.

@ben_h: from what i understand the bottom for podcast ads has really fallen out, so i think a lot of networks are pushing broader programmatic buys to cast a wider net.

the tech seems pretty braindead though. being in the nyc area sometimes they just decide all my ads should be a single repeated ad in Spanish (which, fair enough by demographics in nyc but i neither speak Spanish nor listen to any Spanish podcasts)

and then once in a blue moon the algorithm really freaks out and tries to sell me Toyotas based out of Tulsa or the like.

it's very rarely i get the more offensive political ads- but it's a shock every time i do (it's a lot of "who let this nutjob near a microphone?")