Zodomatica - Bits of Tzaddi's Life

Web advertising and Context

I saw this on thesaurus.com:

Each of these ads is fine on its own, but two ads for the same product from the same company with different prices adds up to one confused customer.

While context is one of the things that makes advertising online an interesting opportunity, it’s also one of the challenges.

Which isn’t to say there’s no context issue in other advertising media; we’ve all seen pictures of billboards gone horribly wrong when paired together or put in an ill-chosen location. But in web advertising it gets trickier.

The above example could probably be solved easily enough with a good adserver+administration, some logic and coordination. Unfortunately, that means the right hand needs to know what the left is doing, and having worked at Telus I can tell you that’s easier said than done in a large corporation!

The limitations of machine logic become apparent when ads are targeted by keyword . At myTELUS we occasionally had complaints of inappropriate advertising: advertising for flight specials next to stories of crashed planes and the like. Yes, the story had related keywords, but humans are a more sensitive to the meaning of those words in context than the adserver was.

And then there’s the trickiness of putting AdSense or other contextual text ads on your business site. Some people are tempted to do that, figuring they might make an easy buck off of work they’re doing anyway. But the thing is, it’s difficult if not impossible to ensure you’re not advertising competitors whom you might not even be aware of. Or, you could be advertising something you wouldn’t support. I met someone recently who has a website on tortoises (of all things!). Although she could monetize her hobby she’s wary of contextual ads which might link to shady pet supplies etc. I wonder if Goodsense green advertising might be a good option for her site.

If you have ads on your blog or website, what do you use? Have you any words of experience to share?

Posted: November 25th, 2008 under Marketing, Web Tips.
Comments: 1

Comments

Years ago, in radio, this problem would come up all the time – two car dealers in the same block of ads, or a funeral home ad following a news story about multiple deaths etc. The ads were logged to run at certain times, in a certain order but, when this happened, we would manually juggle them or even just not run them, running something else. The manual approach had two problems though, 1) more costly than automating and, 2) you were only as good as the person doing the juggling.

I think problems like this will always be around, particularly when it’s automated through programming, though keywords certainly can minimizing it. But again, it’s only as good as the keywords programmed in.

In the example you show, it seems a simple fix (at least to me). You simply have a line of code (if this, then that) that says an ad can’t appear on a page where another ad by the same company appears. So here, a Telus ad cannot appear in the header when a Telus ad appears in the sidebar. But again, it depends on the programming, the keywords … human input that occurs at some stage.

Maybe all of this will disappear when we really get going on AI.