This is either an ingenious media buy or yet another train-wreck on the road to brands figuring out how to operate in Web 2.0.  I'll let you decide.

I'd heard that YouTube and other video sharing sites had launched in-video advertising for its corporate sponsors.

On YouTube, ghosted text ads appear midway through the video.  You can click on the ad bar to visit the sponsor's site and it's a relatively benign form of advertising.  Nothing out of the ordinary here.

But on sites offering a bit more edgy content, things start to fall of the rails.

At Yikers.com, it's hard to avoid the edgier content.  Search for almost anything and a portion of the results will be something you'd be embarrassed to get caught watching at work.

So I wondered what kinds of brands were using Yikers' in-video advertising program.

Turns out to be none other than the good old Disney Corporation.  Better yet, it's DisneyFamily.com, the website that bills itself as "The latest must-have's for every parent."




Here's where the potential brilliance comes in:  if I were "Andrea"'s dad, I might welcome a little intervention from a parenting expert.  Ever the optimist, I clicked on the ad and visited DisneyFamily.com in search of guidance.

It starts our promisingly enough.  Their banner offers "answers to everyday family life", and while this is not my idea of everyday family life, I'm still hoping they'll tell me what to do when I discover "Andrea" is auditioning for ShowGirls for all the world to see.

Sure enough, though you have to fish around to find it, there's a section on " Keeping Teens Safe Online."  And while it doesn't specifically address the correct parental response to webcam stripping, it does offer useful tips like keeping the computer in a common area of the house.

So it is possible, if somewhat unlikely, that Disney has made a brave choice to associate itself with risque content in order to provide a service to frantic parents.  Maybe.

But the other possibility is that Disney has fallen victim to a haphazard media buy.  This scenario seems more likely, given Disney's traditional avoidance of controversy and the fact that no reliable technology exists to efficiently tag and classify video content to display appropriate and relevant advertising the way you can with text.

Brilliant media buy or mickey mouse media planning?  You decide.