Overture and Canadian Pharmacies

So, I work with a Canadian Pharmacy. Nothing illegal, in fact, everything here is above board. Full prescriptions required, Squaretrade certified, not one spam sent.

My job as Marketing Manager is of course, to manage the marketing. I supervise the contracted SEO to make sure he's doing his job (being an SEO myself), do ad buys, write content and marketing letters, track ROI, all that jazz.

Recently I have begun working with Pay-per-click advertising. I signed up with AdWords, and dispite an initial bump in the road regarding a ham-fisted reviewer not even checking my squaretrade ID and rejecting the ads, everything's fine. (With the exception of a terrible conversion rate, which is likely attributed to click fraud.)

Deciding that Adwords wasn't enough, I moved on to advertising with Overture, hearing about much higher conversions and clickthrough rates. Lo and behold, all ads were rejected.

I call up Overture, and after a lengthy confirmation process, they tell me that they don't accept ads from canadian pharmacies



Pish posh! I tell them, 1/3 to 1/2 of all pharmacy ads on Yahoo are from Canadian pharmacies. They tell me that "a few" might "slip through the cracks"



The reasons they give me for this "policy" is that "Canadian pharmacies allow drugs that the FDA has not yet authorized for American use. Of course... Internet = America. I forgot. I inquired into the specific policies involved in this, to which they stonewalled me, and then said I should report my competitors for re-review. I'm not interested in dropping competing ads, that doesn't make the company any money.

The only thing I found was a small blurb buried DEEP in Overture's pages saying that "Canadian Pharmacies must identify themselves as such in their advertisements, and may not specifically target Americans in their ad text". Which I followed to the T. I'm really starting to lose it here.

Has anyone had similar experiences, or perhaps may know of exactly what clandestine evil lurks in the hearts of Inktomi?

 

All I can say is, "THAT'S OVERTURE FOR YA!"

They have no idea what's going on. They don't even know their own TOS!