Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

An entertaining accident of Google Ads “working as intended”: a John McCain campaign ad appears on the page for a YouTube video criticizing crude commentary McCain made about his wife (and the media’s complete lack of coverage of that comment). My assumption is McCain’s ad campaign with Google Ads is targeting pages that mention John McCain, which would make sense except that every once in a while ads will end up on pages that mention John McCain in a negative light.

I noticed the ad last week when dreda linked the video. I went back today and somewhat unsurprisingly… it’s still there. Google Ads is useful and pervasive, but there’s a reason a lot of big advertisers don’t want to take the chance of advertising on pages containing "user-generated content"…

So kudos to the McCain campaign for trying to reach out to the small donors one might find randomly on the Internet… but a bonk in the head for not doing it quite right. It did make me giggle a lot, so thanks guys. Oh, and when I was done giggling, I marveled at how some people stay employed.

YouTube Video pictured above - it is not safe for work and contains offensive language: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Euu_DMhsXQo

As a random coda to this story, this morning I received a junk IM from a known spam source that simply said, “John McCain is aware of the Internet!”

tags: ad placement, advertising, campaign ads, election 2008, google ads, internet ads, john mccain, presidential candidates, youtube