Threatening Obama Ad Called a 'Glitch'
Secret Service investigates possible Obama threat but firm calls it a mistake.
Nov. 14, 2008— -- The Secret Service is investigating an Internet advertisement as a potential threat against President-elect Barack Obama, but the people who created it say a technology glitch was responsible, and they feel terrible about it.
Ads for a company that sells mobile-phone ring tones that appear on the Yahoo News Web site, teased viewers into taking an IQ test. But when viewers scrolled over the ad's picture of Obama, the words "When Will You Die?" flashed across the image.
The Secret Service said it had known about the ad for "a couple of weeks." Yahoo, on the other hand, as well as the company behind the IQ test Web site and the company that designed the ad, learned about it only when contacted by ABCNews.com
"We are aware of this Internet ad, and we are looking into it," said Darrin Blackford, a Secret Service spokesman. "We've had it for a couple of weeks."
The ad depicts a photo of Obama's head atop a cartoon body. It reads: "Barack Obama's IQ is 124!" and "Take the IQ Quiz Now." Some viewers noticed that when they scrolled over the advertisement with their computer mouse, red-colored text that read "When Will You Die?" briefly flashed across a picture of Obama.
Although clicking on the ad brings viewers to the Web site officialiqquiz.com, backed by Australia-based Mobile Messenger, the ad was created by a Chicago firm whose CEO is beside himself at the mistake and said he's a huge Obama supporter.
The company behind the ad, yixe.com, also designed another ring-tone ad that attracted people through a "death clock" Web site, a calculator that claimed to determine when someone would die based on his or date of birth and other factors.
The copy in that ad reads "When Will You Die?" According to Yixe's CEO Eduardo Viva, the ads were created on a single template and a glitch was responsible for imposing the text from the "death clock" ad onto the image of Obama.
"We designed the ad over a template and there was no intent whatsoever for that to happen," Vivas said. "We're huge Obama supporters.
