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Of advertising and social commentary
By Sparky | September 19, 2007
Advertising is an interesting world – companies invading the psyche of the consumer, introducing products and messages with a singular goal in mind: profit. Many companies (AtlasDMT, Google, Yahoo, etc) have been quite successful on the web in finding ways to make contextual advertising automatic, targeted, and easy for both publishers to implement and consumers to use.
That being said I decided to experiment a little bit with advertising on Futurist Now. I’m not really doing this with a financial goal in mind (although having my hosting bills paid for every month would be nice) but more to see how the various contextual algorithms handle my content and what kind of companies they select to place advertisements on.
Obviously they have a vested interest in pushing companies they think my visitors are likely to click on (as their revenue is entirely click based) so seeing the products and services selected provides an insight into the web-browsing consumer, although in a statistically averaged way.
Provided the random nature of my content, and my wide range of topics this experiment has already led to some very interesting results. For instance the Amazon.com contextual advertisement script decided that linking the name Jack Thompson to a product in their catalog which contained a director of the same name as shown by the image below:
Now on the surface this not only makes sense from a technological perspective, but also from that of delightful social commentary. In the post in question I was referring to the now infamous Jack Thompson, legal attack-dog on a crusade against violence in video games. Jack Thompson the ex-attourny (the State of Florida BAR association pulled his license to practice law last year) has spent the last few years trying to ban violent video games as he perceives them to be the cause of almost every ill that threatens society.
Amazon was kind enough to link his name to the movie Feed, which starred an entirely different Jack Thompson, and yet somehow seems fitting. Feed is one of the best trashy C rate movies I am proud to own. The movie revolves around a murder detective who crosses continents in search of a serial killer who lovingly fattens feeds his victims to death. Upon their deaths he liquifies their fat to feed to his next victimlover, thus closing the loop on the food chain and completely disgusting the movies audience.
There is justice in advertising!
Topics: Internet, Movies, Software, Technology, Web gems | Comments Off
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