When online ads go wrong

Kev the online marketing pro had an interesting response to my post about clicking on blog ads, in which he said that the beauty of google ads were that they were obsessively customisable. Which may be true, but it seems that few advertisers care enough to set up intelligent ad campaigns.

As I mentioned before I read a lot of feminist blogs, and I’ve lost count of the number of times that keywords seem to get picked out for all the wrong reasons.

This ad, for example, was illustrating an article about abortion rights:

And this one was on an article about unrealistic beauty expectations:

Such stupid ad placement is obviously infuriating to the reader, embarrassing for the blog and inefficient for the advertiser.

At least some blogs are taking a slightly more intelligent stance – The Curvature, for example, recently changed its ad policy so that offensive ads don’t get through, and they even ask readers to let them know if any do slip in.