Take a look at this page, http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-snail-mail.htm they have an adsense block with a transparent background as well as custom fonts for the links. how did they do this? and is it a violation of TOS?
I don't see how this would be against adsense TOS. But he is simply doing this in his CSS. Look at his code and you will see him referencing the stylesheet:
this brings up some other interesting questions about how far you can push before violating TOS, like what you can have in the background behind the ad and how close the colors can be, etc. I'll have to play around with this.
Bring this to Google's attention and they might give an option for transparent backgrounds or allow you to actually choose your font consistently. One can only hope
Instead of bringing up dumb questions, have a look at the PR of the site, its Alexa rank and then you can only conclude that this website has a lot of traffic and is a premium publisher with other rules than us mere mortals.
premium publisher = premium rules = premium money as simple as that, unless you can make 500$ a day+ consistently dont' bother about these placements!
Looks like it's a network site of a premium publisher.. Premium publishers have some extra privileges that normal publishers don't.
Was looking this up, haven't been doing much Adsense and was wondering how these guys play around with the fonts and backgrounds of the ads. Seems that only premium publishers are allowed though.