I think a lot of these comments are way off the mark. Lets take google/yahoo as an example – before search marketing opportunities came about, there were NO ads on google, or on Yahoo.

There is now, on every search engine in the world (almost) they place ads infront of us that we arn’t asking to see… But do you call that spam?

Does the company you work for advertise? Is that spamming your daily life? When you own a business and have your car painted with your business logos is that spam?

I’d look at the whole topic like SEO, if you optimise your advertisement (or website), get inbound links (PR in this case), make sure content is king (these ads were great) and be live when google comes to index you… You’ll force your way into google’s rankings – it’s no different here.