Cook County Assessor’s Office – Advertising Acceptance Guidelines

Below is a summary of the Cook County Assessor’s Office advertising acceptance guidelines. To receive a copy of the full list of guidelines, please contact us using the form above.

No advertisements or links to sites containing inappropriate material will be accepted. The Assessor’s Office reserves the right to deny any and all requests for inclusion of inappropriate advertisements on its Web site.  In addition, the Assessor’s Office reserves the right to remove any inappropriate link and/or advertisement from the site.

Inappropriate advertising examples include, but are not limited to:

• Unauthorized or unapproved use of the Assessor’s advertisement assets (such as, talent, logos, characters, etc.),

• Gun advertisements (firearms, bullets, etc.),

• Pornography advertisements, including, but not limited to any site selling, showing, linking, offering for free or otherwise, sex related matters in any medium and/or media, products or services that include massage parlors, escort services and/or matters with sexual overtones,

• Potentially slanderous or libelous content,

• Bad language, body parts, proxies for bad language,

• Indecent language or behavior,

• Hostility or violence,

• Gambling,

• Illegal discrimination of any group,

• Attacks considered ethnic, racial, sexual, or religious,

• Ads harmful to children, emotionally or physically.

• Alcoholic beverages,

• Tobacco products,

• Advertisements containing disparaging characteristics,

• Inherently dangerous products,

• Advertisements and/or links for products and/or services that violate the law,

• Advertising that is false, misleading, deceptive and/or offensive to the moral standards of the community, or contrary to good taste,

• Advertising which might be contrary to the best interests of the County, its departments, appointed and elected officials and that state or suggest that proponents or opponents of the persons or measures advertised are vulgar, greedy, immoral, monopolistic, illegal or unfair,

• Political advertising,

• Advertisements involving or referring to political, religious, moral or environmental issues subject to public debate,

• Any information that would subject the Web site to be a public forum,

• Links to sites that contain malicious software that may be uploaded and/or downloaded to the internet user’s computer, including but not limited to spyware, adware, malicious pop-ups, and/or viruses.  Non-malicious “Cookies”, a very small text document which often includes anonymous unique identifiers, are accepted.

Advertisement requirements:

• The assessor reserves the right to reject or to suspend any advertisement that is deemed by the assessor, in his/her sole discretion, to disrupt site service or performance or is reported to negatively affect user experience.

• The advertising content must be clearly identifiable as an advertisement.

• The advertiser must fulfill the advertised offer as stated in the advertisement, including without limitation, not altering any offer periods, product offers or prices that are stated in the advertisement unless advertiser has obtained the assessor's prior approval.

• Advertisements cannot mislead the user. For example, they may not mimic or resemble Windows/Mac/Unix dialog boxes, error messages, or the like.

• Advertisements cannot resemble cookcountyassessor.com content.

• Advertisements cannot solicit or collect, or appear to solicit or collect, any personally identifiable information from cookcountyassessor.com visitors without their knowledge.

• Advertisements cannot mimic news headlines in design, tone, third person sentence structure, or topic.

• Advertisements cannot contain graphics that simulate interactivity (i.e. dropdown menus, search boxes etc.).   Actual interactive ads approved by the Assessor are accepted.

• Audio events:

• Must be initiated by user click

• Must include a clearly labeled button or link to stop audio

• Audio clips cannot loop

•                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Additional specifications that amend or supersede these general guidelines may apply for individual ad products.

Additionally, no advertising will be accepted from attorneys, law firms, or real estate tax representatives who file appeals with the Assessor’s Office.