'Smack' is considered offensive by AdWords

[WAZUMBi]

So I thought I would promote my app Smack a Smiley
on AdMob with a simple banner ad
but it kept getting rejected with no explanation other then
'There has been an internal error. Please try again later.'

I tried for weeks with no success. I posted questions on the AdMob forums with no response and of course one is more likely to discover life on Mars than get an intelligible response from AdMob or Google.

I finally tried a text ad and walla... the solution appeared.
AdWords apparently flags the work 'smack'.
As if smacking things around on our smartphone screens is anything new.

Or maybe the word smiley is too much to handle. I mean, we don't want any sad, smashed, and depressed smiley faces floating around the Android world now do we. It sends a bad message.

I suppose it could be simply the letter 'a' but idunno, I got nothing there.
Maybe 'Smack Your Smiley'?

I came to the conclusion must be the word smack. The word 'smack' does convey a sense of violence and aggression towards your phone.
We don't want our customers to be smacking our phones around too much now do we?.
It's just bad for business.

So what do I do?
Rename my app 'Love and Lightly Tap a Smiley'?
I bet they would have no problem promoting my app Bash a Bieber.

Anyways, I thought this was amusing...

 

[LucaMs]

"Kiss a Smiley"... or is it porn?

 

[WAZUMBi]

I think they would suspend it.
I had an app called Men's Memory & Mind Games which was nothing more than a memory app with ... (clothed) women.
After two years on Google Play and being moderately successful they suspended it.

 

[LucaMs]

I suspect that Google does not know the existence of porn sites.

 

[nwhitfield]

They do seem to have a very puritan outlook in some cases; I know of two dating sites that have have their apps withdrawn, and have ended up going down the route of having a 'clean' version on Play and a full version on their own site; one appears to have been told that men with their chests uncovered was explicit, and another that information which included whether or not people practise safer sex was too much.

While both of those are, to a European such as me, utterly bonkers, they're nevertheless understandable from a company based in a nation that was shocked at the discovery of Janet Jackson's nipples.

I'm very surprised to see that smack would be banned; I can only assume that it's not because of the violent connotations, which seldom seem a concern to the puritans, but because in some places it's an alternative name for heroin.

In the context, of course, it's clear it means nothing like that (unless they consider the smiley face to be related to 90s rave culture, and ecstasy), which suggest that perhaps their scanning of things for ad placement is based on a rather more primitive tech than their trawling and indexing of web pages.

 

[WAZUMBi]

I think you have a valid point.
That never occured to me.
Smiley faces high on heroin and ecstacy sending an innapropriate (subliminal of course) message to our youth.
Hilarious...