Mike On Ads

This is a fairly well known problem in the industry — you target a keyword, say ‘travel’, thinking that you will end up on searches & sites relating to travel. Next thing you know you end up next to a New York Times article talking about the recent plane crash in Lima and how it’s limiting travel to South America — oops

Well — the same thing happened to my blog today and good old Mr. John McCain. Although I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising, I found it slightly ironic that John McCain was advertising next my blog post criticizing his advertisements. See the bottom left on the following screenshot:

And the landing page:

Now first off — these ads look much better than before — maybe they read my earlier post? Now I am incredibly curious whether or not these ads are ROI positive in that they bring in more money in donations than is being spent on media. Anybody know??

Saw this John McCain ad on a random blog this evening:

Reminds me greatly of the giveaways you normally see on myspace… seems they forgot to leave out the “get a free lecture on public policy!!”.

Landing pages even look the same — a simple form with a ZIP & email. I wonder if they’ll sell my email address for $2.00 and use my Zip for later retargeting later.

What’s interesting though is that it looks like the McCain campaign is doing some serious remarketing on “clickers”. There are pixels there for the Right Media Exchange, Ad.com’s Leadback and Atlas!