When Content Matching Backfires

A special report from national advertising correspondent Pauls Toutonghi

Many of you were shocked, saddened, bemused, flummoxed, or at least mildly interested by the death of Anna Nicole Smith this afternoon. But an interesting sidebar to the story comes from the world of online advertising.

In the world of online advertising, content providers (such as CNN) have paid many millions of dollars to set up intelligent advertising systems, systems that match the pages you're viewing to ads you might be interested in -- and then display these ads on your monitor. This is called content-matching. Thus, you go to a news story on say, Winter Weather in Seattle, and an ad for Prozac will appear--hoping to catch you stuck in your home and looking for diversion.

Now, unfortunately, reports of Anna Nicole Smith's death were accompanied by mention of the recent class-action lawsuit filed in Los Angeles against her and TrimSpa Inc.

TrimSpa -- by another unhappy coincidence -- is an advertiser on many of these sites.

The delicacy of this particular combination -- of course -- wasn't understood by the automated content-matching software. Thus, the story announcing the death of Anna Nicole Smith was posted on CNN along with -- you guessed it -- an ad for TrimSpa featuring Anna Nicole Smith.

Ah, the sadnesses of the online advertising age. They are prodigious.