Michael sent along the above screengrab, showing an all-too-familiar sight. A news story with a hee-lariously inappropriate ad placed automatically alongside. Computers are as dumb as we make them. Software looks for matches and places ads “in context” – i.e., if there’s a conversation about Olive Garden, let’s advertise to those people. There’s not enough smarts in place, currently, to find out, say, if this is bad news about Olive Garden. This ad is 180-degrees from the content. Olive Garden sickens people, well, have this coupon ON US, and come on in for some delicious food!

We’ve been laughing at these for years and years and we can stop there, or we can marvel at the fact that this is tolerable to organizations who advertise. Is this a direct-mail mentality? We’ll serve up 3 Million Impressions of the banner ad, and if 10% of them are an inappropriate, so be it, because the click-through rate is so low, it hardly matters? I don’t know what the numbers are on so-called junk mail (as you can imagine, they don’t like call us to call it that), but let’s assume they are very very low. When most of what you send out is seen as garbage, is it okay if some percentage of it actually is garbage? Could this be doing more harm for these brands than good?

The fact that this has become the norm is just a little bit sad. Those of us who design things of any type – to be experienced, seen, heard, read…we want them to be experienced in some relevant context, but we’ve accepted this as a normal error for computers blindly filling in blanks and matching X to B. I’d suggest our culture loses a little when this happens; that we have been bludgeoned just enough to tolerate quack-speak through the medium of the Internet.

We’ll see if firms like Aggregate Knowledge (with some presumably new perspectives on where the most relevant – and profitable – connections can be made) can evolve the status quo.

Tags: advertising, banner ads, context, keyword, olive garden, society

4 Responses to “Signal to Noise”

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Pingback by The Loop 01.19.07 @ 12:23 am

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Below are three links about very different topics… From All This ChittahChattah by Steve Portigal is a post called “Signal To Noise”. It deals with the appropriateness of online advertising by highlighting a funny example. Highly relevant to any companies investing in online advertising: Don’t forget Context! From Adverblog is a link to an

Pingback by PsychObserver 12.17.06 @ 7:37 am

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Do you think that the business models developed around broadcast media and mass markets continue to drive these kinds of “garbage” branding moments?

If so do we look to a better technology solution?

Or do we change the business models?

Just musing – as always, thanks for serving up food for thought.

FYI – I’ve never gotten sick from anything served at All This ChittahChattah! (grin)

Comment by Michael Wagner 12.19.06 @ 8:22 am

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Michael – it’s a good question. What do you think? I feel like the reliance on technology as an almost-free solution to “contextual” advertising is the problem. I don’t know that Google does any better, but their dominance in the online advertising (and moving steadily offline) biz could mean we see more of this type of thing before we see less.

Comment by Steve Portigal 12.19.06 @ 9:51 am

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I agree; reliance on technology seems to be the problem.

So what happens in “us” when we see more and more of this kind of “garbage” branding?

I suspect we develop some variant of banner blindness”?

The incongruity disappears?

Comment by Michael Wagner 12.21.06 @ 3:11 pm

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I hadn’t heard “banner blindness” but that’s a great phrase. I heard an anecdote, third hand at this retelling, about some media company analyzing weblogs to see that the banner blindness, originally tied to a specific region, was very quickly remapped, when the pages were redesigned with a different layout. So the “imperative” we have to build those blind areas seems to be really powerful; that we can re-learn it so quickly…

Comment by Steve Portigal 12.22.06 @ 1:27 pm

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