Coca-Cola and Samsung Pull Advertisements from Website

Both Coca-Cola and Samsung have recently made the decision to remove their advertisements from a very popular Vietnamese website. The website is known for allowing visitors to download tons of unlicensed songs, which is considered illegal and is also considered an action of online piracy which simply should not be tolerated. These two major companies decided to take their advertisements off of Zing.vn after receiving an alert from The Associated Press. The Associated Press informed the two companies about the concerns of the website, a website that happens to be one of the most popular website in the entire nation.

The average visitors of the website are younger individuals who spend plenty of hours online. It is for that reason that a lot of different companies were interested in putting their advertisements on the website, looking to attract the millions of visitors that the website receives on a daily basis. At this current point in time, it is not known as to whether or not the companies knew what type of content was on the site or not. The companies may have known and chose to ignore it or they simply may not have known what kind of content was featured on the website.

Coca-Cola and Samsung are not the only major companies to advertise on Zing. Several other companies, including Canon, Intel, Colgate Palmolive, and Yamaha have all advertised on the website at one time or another. When asked to provide comment on the current situation, Zing provided a statement and said that they could not comment. After receiving information from The Associated Press, Samsung said, “We highly respect and value intellectual property rights, and stand against acts of infringement, such as the unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted material.” Samsung also said, “Accordingly, our advertisements on Zing.vn have been withdrawn.” Coca-Cola also clearly stated that it has stopped advertising on the website and that they would start to investigate websites better before they choose to make decision on advertising on these particular websites. In the past, Coca-Cola had a strong partnership and relationship with Zing.

The Zing website is currently owned by a Vietnamese company, VNG Corporation, known for being a leader of online games. The website currently enables visitors to engage in acts that are considered piracy via deep linking. An alliance representative, Michael Schlesinger, has said, “It is essential that good corporate citizens refrain from spending advertising dollars on services that engage in or encourage infringement.” He also said, “Breaking the chain of support for such notorious piracy services will erode the incentives for illegal services to operate.”