From The Ad Targeting At Its Finest Department

by Michael Arrington on January 14, 2009

Either this is a stock ad and a coincidence or this is a fine example of ad targeting gone wrong. At least it’s something to lighten the mood as Steve Jobs takes a break for health reasons. Thanks for the tip Fabian.

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Steve Jobs

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Comments

Timothy Clemans - January 14th, 2009 at 4:56 pm PST

LOL at Jobs obsolete.

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Just Wondering - January 14th, 2009 at 5:06 pm PST

Does Kaplan offer courses in Pancreas 2.0?

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Nalin - January 14th, 2009 at 5:06 pm PST

hope he gets well. but that is pretty funny.

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Eric - January 14th, 2009 at 5:07 pm PST

WTF is up with the ton of garbage on Techcrunch’s homepage? It’s an orgy of images and ads galore.

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- Leonid S. Knyshov - January 14th, 2009 at 5:16 pm PST
  
  TechCrunch has a homepage? Not according to my XML feed reader and twitter.
  
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- Steve - January 15th, 2009 at 2:07 pm PST
  
  Not only is the Techcrunch homepage an orgy of images and ads but when you hit the homepage it plants 60 cookies. Try it, clear out your cookies, then hit the homepage…sixty cookies!
  
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Zoli Erdos - January 14th, 2009 at 5:08 pm PST

Sadly hilarious. here are a few more:
http://www.zoliblog.com/2008/1.....-dumb-ads/
http://www.zoliblog.com/2007/0.....-blunders/

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FreeJose - January 14th, 2009 at 5:09 pm PST

Get well Steve Jobs.

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Uhh - January 14th, 2009 at 5:15 pm PST

Uhhh … its not really that bad …

An article about semi-retirement because of health reasons matched with an ad from a university touting better job skills is a bad thing in Michael world?

Maybe it was the use of “obsolete” but .. really? this was so controversial to you?

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- Marlo - January 14th, 2009 at 7:12 pm PST
  
  …
  
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Mauricio - January 14th, 2009 at 5:17 pm PST

LOL

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silicon valey dropout - January 14th, 2009 at 5:44 pm PST

truth of matter is ad targeting in general needs work

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Steve - January 14th, 2009 at 6:01 pm PST

I suppose this one’s better than the MSNBC business headline that was next to an Apple story — “Jobs Outlook Grim in 2009″

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bullock - January 14th, 2009 at 6:35 pm PST

snoooooooorrreeeeeee techcrunch…grow up

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TechLang - January 14th, 2009 at 6:47 pm PST

this ad targeting too smart, lol

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Konto - January 14th, 2009 at 7:27 pm PST

An article about semi-retirement because of health reasons matched with an ad from a university touting better job skills is a bad thing in Michael world?

http://kisalt.net/d2

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Ryan L - January 14th, 2009 at 7:34 pm PST

Techcrunch is taking a page out of the failblog.org book. I like it.

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Rajkumar - January 14th, 2009 at 9:31 pm PST

What! Mike you don’t have an ad blocker? seriously?

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Bodenseepeter - January 15th, 2009 at 12:37 am PST

After german billionaire Adolf Merckle committed suicide, the contextual ad next to the news post was a book at Amazon “Last exit: How to commit suicide fast and without pain”. Here is the screenshot.

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- jm - January 15th, 2009 at 10:20 am PST
  
  Thanks for translating what the article and ad say. I can’t even find them on the screenshot.
  
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Fabio Turel - January 15th, 2009 at 3:23 am PST

A semantic engine would have helped here…

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Jonas - January 15th, 2009 at 1:55 pm PST

this most likely a coincidence. I doubt this contextually targeted. Most likely it targeted at “news”, not the keyword “jobs”. If is contextual, it is a great example of the short comings of that technology. Semantic targeting would fix it.

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failspotter - January 15th, 2009 at 3:42 pm PST

Thx. That’s a great one.

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Joe Buhler - January 15th, 2009 at 8:31 pm PST

One more reason why we need the semantic web!

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