Friday, November 2, 2007

Another Flaw in Keyword Advertising

One lesson I remember learning about advertising in my youth was that, whenever there was news of an accident involving an airplane, all airline commercials for the day would be canceled. Unfortunately, the rules of keyword advertising cannot grasp this simple rule. I thought about this when I read an Associated Press report on Yahoo! News that began with the following paragraph:

Two commercial pilots allegedly fell asleep on a flight between Baltimore and Denver, with one pilot waking up to "frantic" calls from air traffic controllers warning them they were approaching the airport at twice the speed allowed.

Most of the space on the Web page, immediately to the right of the next two paragraphs, was then taken up by an advertisement for Southwest Airlines! For me this was a reminder that using a keyword to trigger whether or not an advertisement is displayed along with a news item does not take into account whether or not the connotation of that keyword is positive or negative. Yes, the story turned out to be about an event that took place in March of 2004; but it is still not the sort of story that leads one to thing about air travel. Sometimes those meager humans who ran radio and television stations forty years ago could exercise better judgment than today's software for advertising placement!

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