Stolen Cleavage Ends up in Online Ad

Now this is funny. Three years ago at ad:tech San Francisco while on our usual mission to properly capture the essence of the trade show floor, we captured this shot of a hot looking woman who, by all accounts, had to have had the highest number of eyeballs view her badge over the course of the conference. In addition, that strategic badge placement was enough to garner her, and the company she represented, GenieKnows, a repeat appearance on Adrants in a story entitled In Defense of Booth Babes and Why They're Here to Stay.

Jump forward three years and the all but forgotten woman has reappeared in an online ad on the Coloradoan website promoting a medical bill and coding degree. Of course, it's clear the woman has no idea she's in this ad and permission was certainly never given by us to use this photo in an online ad but this sort of thing happens all the time.

It's what's known as Hottie Clipping. OK, yea, we just made up that term but there are nefarious entities whose sole mission in life is to troll the web for pictures of hot women they can steal and place in their cheesy ads to up sales of whatever crap they're selling. You see this on Facebook all the time.

But these nefarious types are not idiots. Not by any stretch. They know exactly what works and they are fully aware cleavage improves Facebook ad response 61 percent.

However, use of this photo in an ad clearly violates the Creative Commons license affixed to this image on flickr. According to the license, which is part of every image we post to flickr states images can be shared as long as proper attribution is given and that they will not be used for commercial purposes. Clearly this license was broken on both counts.

Of course, who knows where the person found the image. For all we know, it could be floating around in thousands of places by now. But let's not get distracted from the real issue at hand. Boobs and cleavage sell. People don't give a shit where they find these images as long as they think their use will improve the performance of their ad. And they certainly aren't going to go to the effort of actually asking permission to use the image. No. That would simply be too much work.

We guess the only constellation that can be taken way from this is that we have boatloads of this kind of imagery taken over the years and we should feel proud entities out there feel our work is good enough to feature in an ad. So to the asshole out there who stole our work, we thank you from the bottom of this woman's cleavage. Because Lord knows it's far deeper than any crevice in our heart.