Irony in advertising

2008 July 15
by Paul O'Flaherty

irony-in-advertising Contextual advertising is always good for a laugh. In this case someone at HP may be fuming because an advert for their printers was attached to the side of this story on USA Today about privacy concerns related to special codes being almost invisibly printed on printouts coming from 111 color laser printers.

"There’s nothing about this technology that limits its application to counterfeit investigations," says Seth Schoen, a computer programmer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Some people who aren’t doing anything wrong may have their privacy threatened." Schoen’s tests have found the dots produced by 111 color laser printers made by 13 companies including Xerox, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Epson and Brother.

I’m wondering if, or when, we will ever have contextual advertising that can tell the tone of an article and decide not to run an advert?

Reddit
4 Responses leave one →
  1. July 15, 2008

    Wouldn’t this example of uncontrolled ad placement put more strength into the move businesses are making to selecting where, who and when their ads will be placed?

  2. July 17, 2008

    This is hilarious, thanks for the laugh!

  3. July 28, 2008

    this is the biggest issue of contextual ads

  4. September 4, 2008

    That’s pretty funny. Of course this year in the political arena you’ll see even more brazen examples. For instance I saw a McCain ad on The Nation’s website which is a very left weekly. I bet The Nation wishes they could block McCain ads as well.

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