eBay's Advertising Gremlins Want You To Buy Steve Irwin's Death
from the oops dept
For years, Overture (now a part of Yahoo!), used to say that Google's contextual ad matching might be a problem in cases where the text alone didn't provide the right context. They used an example of a news article about someone being stabbed, where Google would supposedly show contextual ads for knives. It was never clear if this was a real example, or something simply made up by Overture's marketing team, but it was mentioned so often that many people assumed it was fact. Whether or not it was true, the Register is pointing to an example that shows these types of problems can happen. Following the news that Steve Irwin (aka "The Crocodile Hunter") was killed this weekend by a stingray, plenty of people searched the internet for news of his death. It's quite likely that many did searches on Google, where apparently at least some were shown an ad offering the ability to "buy Steve Irwin Dead on eBay." This isn't the first time we've seen ridiculous eBay ads, where they clearly are substituting the search term for a wildcard, but it does seem particularly bad in a case like this. You would think that words such as "death" or "dead" would be on the blocked list... but apparently not in this case.
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False Advertising
Would the courts require them to fulfill the first 10,000 sales like they used to do to the airlines?
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of all the things...
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it's true...
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Black People
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It is crazy....
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Double Standards As Usual
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Too Late! Wacko Jacko Bought it
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Re: Double Standards As Usual
so, eBay's adwords are dynamically(?) generated and truly tatseless, while Joe Average businessman like me gets his ads rejected, willy-nilly. The adwords goons usually can't even provide me with a semi-plausible explanation about why one ad was arbitrarily rejected while its body-double was approved.
Too much room for interpretation, I presume.
...or, maybe the problem is coming too close to "the line" when the best strategy is to just go WAY over the line.
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Bad ad strategy
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stupid
Contextually figuring out if something can or cannot be purchased on ebay is an impossible task that such simple advertising gremlins are not equipped to undertake. Nor can they determine if it is "inappropriate". Does this mean that they should destroy the system altogether? Of course not.
Any sane and reasonable person knows that what they search for is fair game to promote advertisements based on the search term.
If I search for "area man stabbed to death" I would expect to see ads for knives just as much as I would expect to see ads for knives if I searched for "how to stab someone to death like a green beret". Maybe I have a stalker and I'm learning self defense, in which case I might appreciate the ads for knives. In the former case, it wouldn't make sense but it would be reasonable and expected and I'm too smart to take offense.
Of course, I hate all advertising and think the world would be a better place if it were all abolished, but I know that's unreasonable. I also know that trying to use AI to determine if rewording your search term into an advertisement is "inappropriate" is far too subjective and impossible.
Anyone who complains about this is too stupid to use the Internet. Any company like Overture that attempts to exploit this flaw in the system is simply acknowledging to advertisers that they refuse to use established, working methods of promotion due to the fear of offending a few idiots and I wouldn't want to advertise with them, so they're just hurting their own business.
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yahoo makes stab at steve irwin dead buys
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Failure
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Other ebay hi-jinks
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Trying to male money
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