Contextual Advertising Bots Confuse Easily
Piers at PSFK observed that Google’s AdSense algorithm pushed to his site ads for low rent, get-rich-quick schemes instead of ads that matched his content (corporate identity, brand marketing and media-business trends) or the audience profile (entrepreneurs and marketing execs):
“Google Adsense is a fiendishly clever system that predicts the perfect ad for the reader based on content and some other dark-magic. Anyway, the system must have gone wrong. Instead of ads for fast cars, boutique hotels, fine wines and expensive watches, we’re getting ‘make money fast’, ‘make money blogging’ and ‘email marketing software to spam your way to success’ ads.”
His post reminded me of a call I received a few months ago from the Ad Council. They were concerned that their client, Girl Scouts of America, who bought ads through a behavioral-targeting ad network FM uses to backfill unsold banner impressions, ended up with ads on our adult-beverage site, Drink of the Week. Oops! Humans still have the bots beat when it comes to the subtle art of understanding context.
[...] Blog « Contextual Advertising Bots Confuse Easily [...]
[...] At least they’re in the very early stages of giving us more relevant ads. I bet that real improvements in relevancy targeting (some examples of the shortcomings today, ChasNote 8/12/06) will tilt the cost-benefit see-saw in favor of relevant ads and away from privacy fears. Let’s get there asap! [...]
[...] Granted, I’m biased. But disagree with two aspects of Schmidt’s comments. First, I still see a lot of evidence that the Google bots aren’t nearly as good as they promise at delivering advertising relevance (see ChasNote 8/12/06). Two, while paid search is certainly a boon to direct marketers, it’s still not delivering to publishers even half the revenues (in rates per thousand pageviews) as those old-fashioned targeted sales people. According to the CPM numbers included in the Sept 1 Business 2.0 cover story, teeny tiny Federated Media (my employer) — with its mere 3 targeted sales people on staff in Q2 — delivered $8 average CPMs for its network of blog sites. Gawker Media does about the same (between $8 and $10), while “CPM rates on Google AdSense and competing automated systems are estimated at anywhere from 50 cents to a few bucks.” [...]