Coca-Cola and Samsung remove advertisements on Vietnam site

Coca-Cola and Samsung have pulled their advertising from a popular Vietnamese website notorious for providing unlicensed downloads of Western and local songs, in a rare victory against online piracy in a country where it has grown unchecked.

The companies abandoned Zing.vn after The Associated Press alerted them to local and international concerns about the website, which is the sixth-most visited in the nation of 87 million people.

Zing's audience of young, tech-savvy Web users has made it attractive to companies wanting to promote their products in a fast-growing Asian market where some 30 million people are online. It was unclear if the companies were ignorant of the content of the site or chose to ignore it.

Besides Coca-Cola Co. and South Korea's Samsung, other multinationals that have advertised on Zing include Canon, Yamaha, Intel and Colgate Palmolive. Zing said in a statement it couldn't comment.

The presence of international advertising added to the legitimacy of Zing, causing particular anger among Vietnamese artists who felt the site was profiting from their work without compensating them. After being contacted by The AP, Samsung and Coca-Cola said in separate statements they had withdrawn their ads.-The China Post (October 04, 2012 11:52AM)