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Odd Placements


Here I was reading this article about how one day we getting broadband would be as easy as flipping a light switch. My physics is a little rusty so the implementation details of this technology did not fully register with me. But before I could get too carried away by this vision of a wonderful future where broadband beam wherever a light bulb did, a rude awakening came in the form of a Google Ad which said:

Comcast Internet - $19.99/Mo For 6Mo. Free Wireless Modem. No Contract ; $25 Back!

It would be hard to imagine a more ill-conceived spot for the Comcast offering. Talk about a rude jolt back into the here and now. Just out of curiosity, I browsed around the website to see if ads were more meaningfully placed on the other articles.

There was this plug for the local pest control service on an article devoted to studying the habits of insects and patterns in their movements using DNA bar-coding. On a deep-sea robot article was an ad for Chevy Vehicles.

This reminded me of the dot-com boom days when recruiters would latch on to specific keywords on resumes and hound people to consider job opportunities that did not fit their profile even at a grazing tangent. There were a ton of jobs, a relatively short list of keywords and many recruiters. Every once in a while, some connections would be come out right even if the majority misfired completely. Maybe its not a lot different with ad words.
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