What is the current relationship between ads and organic results?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Michael Martinez: Ads in the SERPs don`t have any effect on the organic listings, and vice versa.
  
  For reputation management, though. advertising can help crowd the top of the results if negative content is outranking positive content. It has no effect on rankings - just on what searchers see in the SERPs.
  
  But I would be careful about starting ad campaigns for queries that don`t display any relevant ads. Opportunistic ad campaigns can jump into those queries and lead people away from the site (assuming the queries generate any clicks).
  
  Reputation isn`t always about traffic. Sometimes it`s just about pride. And while these vanity queries don`t make much sense when you look at the data, they can be a huge distraction for the decision-makers and stakeholders in a company or organization. Individuals can also experience incredible stress from knowing these negative results are out there, so I`m not saying it`s not worth it to run ads in a low-traffic SERP - but be prepared to see someone else`s experimental ads show up.
  
  
• 
  Todd Weise: Right... I get that doing a campaign isn`t going to affect their own organic, but was curious if, as you allude to, it could help crowd out space to push those other results down in the results.
  
  
• 
  Michael Martinez: Todd Weise Reputation management is mostly a content play. You want to publish good, informative, uncontroversial content on well-linked sites that have a great chance of ranking for the query you`re trying to protect.
  
  
• 
  Michael Martinez: Todd Weise And remember Rule No. 1 of Online Reputation Management: STAY AWAY FROM WIKIPEDIA.
  
  Clients always want you to go in and edit a Wikipedia page, or create one. That`s the worst possible way to manage online reputation. Wikipedia doesn`t take kindly to being used for self-promotional campaigns.
  
  If the client wants to spend money, the best strategies use premium press releases and blog posts - NOT for links, but for placement in the search results on high value sites.
  
  
• 
  Stockbridge Truslow: Learn about "Semantic SEO" and the knowledge graph. This is where those negative results can work their way into things. A good reputation management program can drown out the negatives and make sure the KG attaches the message you want as opposed to the one that`s out there.
  
  That said... make sure it`s worth doing and there is some actual potential issue first. If you create the connections that don`t exist, it is a lot easier for someone to redefine them to their needs that it would have been to create them in the first place. So... be careful.
  
  Typically - there isn`t a lot to worry about - especially with just one noisemaker out there.
  
  
• 
  Todd Weise: Stockbridge Truslow the concern is just about name based searches for this person who represents them for certain issues/topics/consultancy.
  
  
• 
  Stockbridge Truslow: Right.... and as Michael points out - ads don`t affect the organic SERPs. The way you combat this is to control the meaning of your brand and taking control of it out of this other person`s hands.
  
  
• 
  Josh Levenson: Sounds like employee X needs to write some blog posts on the company website.