Online-Marketers Beware! A story on Contextual Ads Dark Side

I found this on ClickZ Internet Marketing Solutions for Marketers .

The article is titled Contextual Ads: Online Media's Ace in the Hole.

Ever see those advertisements that correspond to whatever you are searching for. Search engines like google and yahoo offer contextual delivery of paid search ads. This ensures that ads relevent to your search are displayed and target the appropriate consumer.

But what happens if your advertisment goes out when there is some sort of horrible disaster?!?

For example say you are advertising for powdered donuts...but it just so happens that president Bush and Dick Cheney are hunting in the woods, Bush is eating your brand of powdered donuts, and Dick Cheney shoots him for some strange reason. Lets call this almost true article Cheney Accidentally Shoots Fellow Hunter.

Now if reporters made a big deal about the donuts, then your ads may show up in relation to the news article...(I know this is a huge stretch--and this may acctually help advertising)

But there's no need to worry...Contextual networks are well aware of the problem and have provisions in place to prevent contextual advertising missteps.

ContextWeb, a contextual advertising network, has a patent pending on its algorithm technology that sorts through an article's negative and positve words.

"On negative articles," Sarkar says, "the quantity of negative words in relation to the other words is higher, and therefore the article will get a lower ranking for a particular category." If an article is about a plane crash, for example, words like "plane crash," "ambulance," and "death," will rank higher than words like "travel," "hotels," and "holiday."

I find all of this extremely facinating. It is crazy to see how numbers control the world