Read a great article on how to avoid contextual tragedies by J. Brooke Aker, the CEO of the US subsidiary of semantic technology firm Expert System.
The article discusses the promise of semantic advertising (in particular, the kind that is better at figuring out what a page really means when deciding which ads to place on it). To make his case, Aker shows a number of examples where plain old keyword-based contextual advertising went astray.
They’re amusing examples — my favorite is the free dinner for two at Olive Garden coupon placed in the Reuters article about 250 people getting sick at an Indiana Olive Garden — but they serve to illustrate the danger of keyword-only algorithms.
Good sample cases for the Semantic Advertising Contextual Corpus too.
