Project of the day: Contextually Active
Since I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about contextual advertising and the move from contextual ads to user-behavior based targeting, I have been seeing great examples of awful contextual ads. By awful, I’m referring to ads that are either funny or inappropriate when viewed in the context of the article or content on the page.
The extreme examples do a great job at illustrating the inherent problem with contextual advertising: the machines don’t understand feeling. Sure, contextual advertising systems are great at analyzing the content on a page and matching dense keywords and phrases against a list of ads (you know, the basic idea behind AdWords). However, they cannot tell when such an ad is “appropriate” to carbon-based life forms.
One example is an article about a tragic fire in which five members of a family were killed. The contextual ad system saw the term “fire” and most likely saw that the house was destroyed, and displayed an advertisement for fire insurance. In one sense, displaying such in ad would seem inappropriate; no insurance company would want their ad featured next to this story. However, on the other hand, the system has done it’s job perfectly.
On the lighter side, there are countless examples of “perfectly placed ads”. These are ads like the following:
These ads are just fit so perfectly in the context of the content that they must be shared.
So, with that said, I finally got around to registering a domain: ContextuallyActive.com. The idea is to display great examples of poor contextual advertising execution. Whether funny, inappropriate, or so appropriate that it’s funny, I just set up the domain as a little project. So, if you see any great examples, please feel free to send me a link or a screenshot (I’ll obviously give full attribution and a link). My email address is nathan dot burke at gmail you know the rest.
Filed under: blogging, online advertising, shameless self promotion
