Earlier today, I posted an article from Franz Patzig about flickr and the censorship from their German customers. Someone then submitted it to Digg. About thirty minutes ago I received an email noting that on Digg, the Google ads somehow matched the story about flickr censorship to ads for Hitler's ringtones.
See the image below. What's interesting to me about this is two things: the content matching might be close to correct I guess if you assume that "germany + censorship" might equal "hitler" but ringtones? Clicking the link gives me one of those crappy monthly ringtone services but no mention of Hitler.
The "social context" is what's missing in these ads. "Hitler Ringtones" which has nothing to do with Hitler looks like SEO desperation on the advertiser's part...Google (and the others) also has a real weakness with the social context of terms. Someone I was chatting with this afternoon mentioned that phrase to me with regards to ads, and you have to wonder as more of us create content online, whether ad companies will start to use this as a part of their matching systems. The algorithms don't understand social context or meaning.
Do you have good examples of very poor ad matching? Leave them in the comments.
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