A thread at WebmasterWorld named Does Yahoo Change Your Ad Copy? discusses a annoyance some advertisers are having with YSM (Yahoo! Search Marketing). Basically, the advertiser creates, what they think, creative ad copy and Yahoo! changes the copy without letting the advertiser know. Then Yahoo makes those ads live, without notification of ad copy change to the advertiser.
The thread creator reports;
A couple of day ago I saw this listing suddenly had a completely different ad-copy from what I originally wrote! It had generated double the clicks I used to have for about 3 days, so it costs me some money. But when I checked my sales for that listing, there were ZERO conversions. The new ad-copy, from wich I have no idea how it got there, was a complete mismatch with my landingpage. So whoever added that stupid ad-copy ows me 50 bucks!
An other member reports;
I took a look and Overture has changed the wording in a number of my listings. Often the meaning is changed, sometimes the new sentences are not even gramatical.
But the shocker is a response one advertiser received from a Yahoo! representative. When the advertiser asked the editor not to change the ad copy, he received a response with something of the effect of... "So they just said if you don't want the content changed, let them know and they will just decline the listing next time." I doubt this was quoted, but that is how the advertiser, obviously, took the message.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.