Ah, advertising

Advertisers are a canny lot and I really admire some of the stuff they come up with. Unfortunately, the folks who buy the media don’t always seem to be thinking straight! Which is what leads to situations like this…

For the uninitiated, a 404 in the online world is simply bad news! It denotes a ‘page not found’ error and for a company like Yahoo!, that’s simply money lost. I would have to say that in the case of this particular ad, it is money lost!

But what about some other situations? How about a cigarette ad appearing next to the ad of a cancer survivor? Some may find it crude and humourless (and it is) but the fact is that it’s plain darn dumb not to check what’s running around your ad at the time, eh?

While these measures may be possible in the real world, what about the virtual world? With ‘contextual’ ads now becoming the norm (and behaviorial ads on their way), you will see an ad relevant to the content you are perusing at that time on the web page. And the outcome can have rather hilarious results:

Once again, this is distasteful to some, while plain bad luck for others. But most would have a snigger at this! I did.

These aren’t the only two examples, either. Check out this page for a whole list of more such stuff and mind you, there are two ads that are meant to be on this page; they belong to the publisher of the site!

Got more? Share with me. I always enjoy a good laugh!