While we wait for the semantic web to serve up really targeted and useful ads, I, for one, continue to ignore 99% of the ads presented to me.
But sometimes, they slip through, twice today in fact.
Although they work pretty much all the time, Google Ads have turned up many failures in the past. For example, I know a woman who quit using GMail because it served her an ad about hunting; the algorithm saw her emails about traps, which were being used to trap stray cats to spay/neuter them. As an animal lover, she was outraged and stopped using her account.
If you read the FAIL blog, you’ve probably seen some other Google Ad fails as well. Coincidentally, I saw the item pictured here in another blog operated by the folks at The Cheezburger Network, I Can Has Cheezburger, which if you read here, you know I adore. Surprised there’s a company around funny pictures with captions? You shouldn’t be.
Advertising dollars are still driven by traffic, and the various blogs of The Cheezburger Network garner many millions of pageviews each month. So, you’re bound to get a hiccup every once in a while.
Social network advertising is the promised land for online advertisers because they hope to mine all the personal data you provide a site like Facebook to show you the most targeted ads. Alas, clickthroughs on social networks ad are woefully low, and as with Google ads, there are well-documented hiccups.
Today, Facebook made me laugh. It doesn’t think I’m fat per se, but it does want me to know about how I can get six-pack abs. And the best one for today was the ad that asked me if I wanted to know more about my wife. That one slipped past before I could click it for me details, but its presence alone made me laugh.
Then suspicious.
Everyone has these stories. Share them in the comments.
