Comments on: Are Media Companies Out-Innovating Their Advertisers?

By: jeremy

jeremy — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:06:04 +0000

There was a classic early-days AdSense gaff that you may remember. There was a AP article about a woman who had been murdered and stuffed inside of a suitcase. It had been picked up and syndicated. And almost everywhere that Google AdSense appeared next to that story, it was serving advertisements for suitcases. Ouch.

Now that sort of thing can be corrected for, by doing some sort of “sensitive theme” classification. But with most media, there is nothing you can correct it to, because by its very nature, media is creative, not literal.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:01:38 +0000

Jeremy, that is awesome! Though I’d hope today you could actually make the in-line ads part of the audio track (e.g., on YouTube).

I’m curious if any of the various lyrics sites have AdSense set up so we can see this keyword-matching in action. Strikes me as having potential as an endless source of humor…

By: If you think The Web can survive without advertising you’re nuts - WinExtra

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 06:13:59 +0000

[...] lot of very smart people, like Daniel Tunkelang, dream of a web that can move away from an ad supported model. It’s a nice dream but it is a [...]

By: jeremy

jeremy — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 05:08:25 +0000

I commented on this a few years ago (April 2006 — yes I’ve had the commenting habit for quite a while now) on Paul Lamere’s blog, about why advertising cannot catch up to media. Good media is simply not “advertiseable”. You can’t really pair it up with anything relevant.

The idea is Google trying to sell relevant advertising against a Music search/recommender service. It’s what happens when the Google keyword-matching mindset meets something with a little more creativity: music lyrics.

http://blogs.sun.com/plamere/entry/guaranteed_to_raise_a_smile