ChasNote

Last week I came across another case of the advertising robots looking dumb relative to their human counterparts.

Not that I don’t love technology and dream about a future where contextual ad-serving algorithms will mature to a point that brand advertisers can trust them as much as direct marketers do today. But we ain’t there. The tech-driven targeting engines of today’s ad networks (I include Google’s AdSense in this list) continue to put their advertising customers in awkward situations when they deliver scale (zillions of impressions across thousands of sites) without solving for advertisers’ need for quality environments and context that goes beyond keyword matching.

Techdirt pointed me to an example of Wal-Mart running ads on anti-copyright site (and illegal entity, per the Swedish government) Pirate Bay. According to Variety, the Wal-Mart ads were placed by Targetpoint, “an Israeli online ad agency that serves ads to match targeted queries on the Web.” My colleague Justin Watt brought to my attention that Microsoft is running on the same site (Justinsomnia).

I’m guessing Microsoft is another client of Targetpoint’s, because there’s absolutely no way that Microsoft (or Wal-Mart) would knowingly spend money supporting Pirate Bay. In fact I’m pretty confident that neither would allow their brands to run on the site, even if the advertising were free.

In a post last August, I disagreed with Eric Schmidt’s quote that a targeted ad is better than a targeted salesperson (see ChasNote 8/24/06). On second thought, I actually agree. But I’m still waiting to meet one!