Internet Marketing Weasels

I'm a big fan of internet advertising - because like direct marketing, it can be targeted, tracked, and 'accountable' in ways that are simply impossible for traditional advertising to match.

But it's not point, click, and cash-the-check with all forms of internet advertising. Take for example Contextual Internet Advertising. This form of internet advertising was supposed to be the greatest thing since, well . . . since Al Gore invented the internet. The idea is that your ad is only placed on web pages that have content that matches up to what you're trying to sell. Have an ad selling cameras? Contextual advertising will place your ad on a blog about photography or a news story about cameras.

But what happens when the programming gets the context all wrong? Then it stops being advertising, and it starts being amusing.

For example, it's likely that Orbitz didn't really have these types of locations in mind when they created their contextual ad.