Adrants reader Patrick Bennet ponders the oddity of a Hummer ad placed in conjunction with CNN London bombing stories, writing, “Am I the only one who can’t help but notice the irony in the fact that every time I want to watch a video on the CNN website about the latest bombing in London, or deaths in Iraq, or terrorists in general there is a Hummer ad preceding the story?
It’s as though Hummer wants to make sure they tie their oil dependency inducing vehicles as closely as possible to the results of that kind of thing.
Am I the only one noticing this? If you were Hummer, is this where you would put your ads? Before stories of terror and mideast instability?”
Either Hummer has intentionally planned this through contextual keywords or it’s just an unfortunate side effect of the contextual advertising concept. Of course, Patrick might be one of the few people seeing this placement, having been previously identified, via cookies and behavioral targeting through the likes of Tacoda, as having exhibited car buying behavior elsewhere on the web.
