Some things you may want to know:
1. The advertiser is only charged the first time its link is clicked from any given IP address.
The program can be set up so that once you click, the ad will not appear to your IP address for a given period of time.
by Clayton Browne
Member since:
March 11, 2010 Goldman Sachs: Financial Reform - The White House vs Goldman Sachs
April 19, 2010 10:17 PM EDT (Updated: April 20, 2010 11:16 PM EDT)
The gloves have come off. The White House and Goldman Sachs, who have long been in lock step on financial policy, are now, according to political blogger Taegan Goddard, gearing up for "all out war".
Certainly the conflict revolves around the SEC's fraud prosecution of Goldman Sachs, announced last week, but that is just the tip of the iceberg in this grudge match.
The fraud prosecution PR battle is just a part of the larger war on Capitol Hill over the financial reform bill. The president is scheduled to give a major speech on the ills of Wall Street and the pressing need for financial reform at New York's Cooper Union on Thursday. And Obama and the White House are trying to leverage the anti-Goldman sentiment created by news of the fraud investigation to gain as much political advantage as possible.
They are going full bore - a Google search using the words "Goldman Sachs" and "SEC" yields among its top sponsored links a BarackObama.com ad promoting the financial reform bill, as noted by the Los Angeles Times. Goldman has also come up with their own search link that sends users using the same two search terms to the company's response to the SEC's fraud complaint.
Goldman is fighting the PR war on several fronts. CEO Lloyd Blankfein sent out a voicemail to Goldman's employees over the weekend. He emphasized the main talking points in Goldman's PR campaign: that the senior management condoned none of the alleged misrepresentations of Goldman's role in the disputed deals, and that Goldman had actually lost money on the deals in question.
The SEC complaint alleges that bankers involved with a Goldman fund named Abacus were short-selling CDOs — ie., betting they would fail — while the bank also promoted them to clients. The New York Times also published a report today saying that disputes in 2006 between the Goldman executives heading Abacus and other Goldman leaders concerning the future of the housing market reached high levels of Goldman management. even perhaps as high as Blankfein's office.
I didn't see the ad and I only went to that link once.
Since I'm on dial up, I guess I can use a different IP every day. ha ha ha