Nah, there is just a communications gap between the editor slaves who are stringing together the spots, the news bureau, and the engineers physically putting the tape into the live feeds. It's a bureaucracy, and all that would have had to have happened is some assistant forgot to tell the guy putting the particular beta tape with all the ads into the feed not to remove that particular Hotel.com spot (which itself would have taken time and shuffling of priorities among the personnel).
The computerized ad stuff we have now wasn't developed until 2003. It was still all Digibeta in the 90's and based on friggin' phone calls and frantic editing work I bet.