Ordinary Nothing

Among my various email accounts I have an email account on Gmail. And the way one pays for this free email service is by seeing ads from Google’s own ad service, AdSense.

Which presents textual ads. Ads which are supposed to be based on context from the page. What they hope for, naturally, is that the ads will be relevant to the content of the emails, thereby increasing the chance of the ads actually being relevant to the people reading the emails.

How that goes for them in general, I don’t know. If it works well, there’s the obvious creep factor, of seeing ads talking about a personal email.

From my personal experience it doesn’t work so well, and the ads are often not really relevant. Just because they match a few words that the ads were purchased for, doesn’t mean these words were what the email was about.

Sometimes, though, there are exceptions. Huge ones, sometimes. And really funny, sometimes.

Like the one time I saw a prominent ad that appeared on my spam folder/label. The code behind the ads managed to notice that the word “spam” was very prominent on that page (Gee, I wonder why?), and so showed me an ad for… SPAM.

Right on the word, but oh so wrong on the context…

And since many people will probably have the word “spam” appearing somewhere in their spam folders, I wonder how wide-spread this is. If anyone bothers to even look at those ads to notice it, that is?

February 17th, 2006 at 2:34 EET | Categories: Marketing | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.