Political Advertising

In John McCain, Google and the politics of advertising, Part 1, I explained how web crawlers work, why they like sites created with Drupal and how Google, the world's largest search engine, has not just successfully married web crawling with contextual advertising, but has become the de facto operating system for all online propaganda campaigns, including politics.

In this second part, I'll try to explain why McCain's ad keeps popping on our site.

So back to the McCain ad.

GoogleAdwords is a contextual advertising network. What this means is that Google uses their search technology to find through all it's publishers the best ad real estate for their clients. This is what Google has to say about the program (emphasis mine):

AdWords lets you create simple, effective ads and display them to people already searching online for information related to your business. So how is it possible to show your ads only to the most relevant audiences? The answer is keyword-based advertising.

When a searcher visits Google and enters a query — say, 'good beginner guitars' — Google will display a variety of relevant search results, such as links to articles containing guitar purchasing advice, or websites dedicated to novice musicians. It will also display AdWords ads that link to online businesses selling guitars, music lessons, or other products and services related to the query.

Given we have an easily searchable, keyword rich site, this means the McCain people must have bought a lot of keywords that have to do with elections, politics and the man himself. Now, the big question is : why would it appear on my personal page as well as the politics sites?

Rubyji is not the only one to have noticed the John McCain ads that have been popping on the site lately.

Last week I got pinged by Azi Paybarah, a fellow political journo-blogger for New York Observer's The Politicker. I guess Azi needed to check out how babelicious I am and was perusing my (soon to be updated) bio at lizasabater.com.

To his horror, he found this :

Yes, that's a John McCain ad right next my mug.

Now, there's the "sensible" explanation for this freakish political mashup and then there's the conspiracy theory. The explanation, though, will shed light into some of my web development skills and the techniques I have used to develop my sites.

So grab yourself a cup of coffee, pull up a chair and get yourself comfortable. Some major geekatude is coming your way.