When Keyword Matching Starts Turning Upon Itself, Things Can Get Pretty Goofy...

I was cleaning out my spam folder in my Gmail box (no, the account is very private, and you can't have the address)... and what should I see after all the files had been deleted but a little clickable ad for "Spam Breakfast Burritos."

My mind, being what it is, immediately turned to: "You mean you can make food out of junk email?"

Gosh, if that were true, world hunger would be ended in 0.000000000003 seconds.

Or something like that.

But alas, that was not what the ad meant.  Of course I had to click on it to see what it was, and here is what I found:

(click here to see what I found)

Google, in its compulsion to monetize every second of use of Gmail, had placed an ad in reference to the only content word on the page: Spam.

Am I peeved?

Nah, I got a good laugh out of it.

But this is something to watch out for.

How far could this go?

It could get pretty intrusive.

Imagine, if you be a guy, that you are standing at a urinal in some commercial building, and the hologram of a doctor appears in front of you with the words: "This moment of relief is brought to you by Flomax.  If your flow isn't all you want it to be... "

I can't finish this. 

And yes, I know there are already billboards atop the urinals in many men's rooms already.

So I'll stop by saying thank you, Seth Godin, for inventing the term "Permission Marketing."

David Garfinkel
Publisher, World Copywriting Newsletter

Comments

[Brian Clark]

What's worse is that recipe site paying for large amounts of untargeted curiousity clicks. And yet I see that very ad all the time in gmail when clearing out the garbage. :)

[Elizabeth]

Heh. I remember the first time I found those...

In the spam folder case, I don't *think* that any money is being made. You'll notice that if you keep clicking in the spam folder, all you get are spam recipes found at Recipe Source, which is the home of one of the Internet's oldest recipe collections (and ad-free, short of a little Adsense here and there).

So in this case, I concluded that they're just trying to be cute. But! Your point is well-taken. All is well and good while Google is on our side, so to speak. They have so much information on everyone and everything now, they really could do some damage. Big Brother, thy name could be Google.

[David Garfinkel]

Elizabeth...

You are so right. I may have overreacted! This morning it was Spam Imperial Tortillas!

I guess I was one of those semi-humorless users (remember, I did laugh, after all) who didn't quite "get it" on first glance.

Well, Elizabeth, thanks for the enlightenment!

BTW - it wasn't the money-being-made issue that was of concern to me. It was the keyword matching gone berserk, and what it could lead to. But now that I am led to believe this was a very conscious, capricious act by a puckish prankster at Google, I'm at ease on this one.

[chris]

All the more reason to keep your gmail account a secret, David. Mine somehow got out, and the usual onslaught of Viagra and sex toy spam ensued. Judging from the ads in my inbox, now, you'd think I was some kind of nympho...