I just encountered an advertising mishap in the wild and had to share. When it comes to brand safety, this was a bad one.

Bear Brook is a popular serial-style true crime podcast first published in 2018. It tells the story of the investigation around bodies discovered near a state park that unfolds over decades.

**Spoiler alert below!**

After several twists and turns, the killer is revealed to be Terry Rasmussen, who turns out to be a bad, bad guy. His crimes include abandoning his child, several separate murders, and all kinds of fraud. One of the aliases that he adopts along the way was Robert “Bob” Evans and through some new investigative techniques including forensic genealogy, he is linked to the murders.

The podcast was well made and has had a long life in the world of podcasts. After being released by New Hampshire Public Radio, the show had been downloaded an estimated 1.1 million times in its first year. Since then, it has only grown in popularity due to word of mouth and coverage, and it’s now topped 12 million downloads according to estimates, creating a formidable advertising asset.

Unfortunately, the show was originally produced without advertisers in mind, raising support directly from listeners in the early days. Since then, the show has been syndicated with advertising spots bolted on through the show, presumably through an automated content-matching service. In a case of contextual advertising gone wrong, one of the audio ads that showed up in my feed was for Bob Evans the breakfast restaurant, helpfully matched to the episode featuring the serial killer with the same assumed name. Whoops!

For brands looking to gain reach at scale, it’s a cautionary tale for using programmatic marketplaces without appropriate oversight. Brand safety bidding protections against mature themes including violence are essential for protecting your brand from becoming associated with an unintended spokesperson.