January 3, 2006

Ford Motor Co. experimented with Google AdWords last week that advertised its Ford Explorer trucks on many blogs and search-related Web sites.

Some ads featured large skyscraper banners on right sidebars and reinforcing Ford Explorer text ads after the first blog post.

From an advertiser perspective, the Ford Explorer campaign must be quite exciting and Ford found them to be comparable to TV and Radio advertising from a branding, impression and Gross Rating Point point-of-view.

From the blogging and site publisher side of things, not many publishers were too thrilled with the Ford campaign and perhaps felt that Google pulled a swift one on them, replacing contentually targeted relevant advertising with less effective Ford ads.

Personally, I more or less forgot about the campaign until having a conversation with my father over the Holiday weekend about my sister buying a Mitsubishi.

My dad is a Ford/Chevy/Chrysler man and the Mitsubishi is the first vehicle in my immediate family made by a Japanese Auto Manufacturer.

Dad brought up the old family tradition of supporting Detroit by buying an American car.

I brought up the counterpoint that I’d rather buy an American made Mitsubishi than a Mexican made Ford, and that buying GM or Ford anymore is more or less supporting the unemployment of the American worker, and how most Japanese brands sold in the US are now manufactured Stateside by US employees, not to mention the differences in quality.

Needless to say, I won the argument.

Getting away from NAFTA and Big Auto controversies, Aaron has a nice little write up on the ad campaign.

By Google delivering Explorer ads that are so far off target they are teaching site visitors to ignore the ads, and may be costing themselves and publishers a lot more than they realize.

If people learn to ignore textual ads then funding good content production is much harder. If people can’t afford to make good content then Google is going to be full of garbage.

I know I have read a number of times about how Google did not like when people bought off topic links.

Do they think they are doing the web a favor by putting those Explorer ads on exceptionally off target websites? Where does the targeting end? Why is it legitimate to publish AdSense ads so far off topic if off topic links are bad?

Source: Search Engine Journal

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