It’s probably the context that weirds me out, but still. I was watching this completely freaky acid-trip of a Simpsons parody (imagine David Lynch directing and you wouldn’t be far off) made by the Something Awful crew and being slightly creeped out by the whole thing when I notice something even more puzzling:
Click on the ad and it does, in fact, take me to the BBC, specifically to the Hereford and Worcester page of their local TV console thing. The page doesn’t really work on my Mac, but it does resize the window which is nice. Anyway, that wasn’t the point. The point was… wtf?! Probably more weirded out by the connection of BBC Kidderminster with dirty parodies of The Simpsons than anything else, but still. I didn’t even know the BBC did Google Adwords. I suppose someone else could have done it. Not that it’s necessarily bad or anything. Just freaky weird.
7 replies on “On super-bizarre BBC Adword placements…”
This video was NOT made by SA goons. Sorry.
The creators website is http://www.ghxyk2.com
Actually, the video was made by E-Baums World, Something Awful just stole it.
I believed the Something Awful brigade to have chosen this video as the subject of yet another experiment in trying to create a viral.
It’s more likely BBC Kidderminster has a connection with you (or thinks it has) than with this parody: where do you live?
Google ads look not just at webpage content after all, but also at geographical location of the person browsing the page…
No – I have absolutely no connection with that area at all. I live in West London near Paddington. My family live in Norfolk.
Geolocation by IP address to a city/town level is almost impossible in the UK (apart from on some cable networks).
Perhaps you had looked at a page about Kidderminster (or related terms) previously?
Knowing Google (and the amount of money they make through AdSense) they will have a stupidly large number of variables to choose the the best advert. For instance, they crawl the ‘landing page’ (where the advert clicks through to) on.
I was seeing these for another area (I think it was Hereford?) on my completely unrelated site. Waste of license payers money?