A friend posted a link on Twitter to a blog post on the France Burqa Ban. The post is by Saudiwoman’s Weblog. I suggest you visit the page. She has an interesting point of view on the topic.
But my post is not about the Burqa ban.
What caught my attention on that page was the targeted ‘Ads by Google’ part. The ad was for an Arabic website called Almaseeh2020.com (Christ 2020). I am not very religious so I won’t read much into it but it’s interesting how Google Ads work. An ad for site that preaches love for Christ and Christianity on a Saudi based blog with several topics covering the Islam and the Muslim communities. Hallelujah!
Note: Due to the length of Saudiwoman’s Weblog post, I took one snapshot of the first paragraph and another one of the ad (placed at the bottom of the article) and pasted them together.
2 comments:
Targeted ads is a misnomer. The process is that I create an ad, like the one above, and then assign keywords to that ad, let's say Islam, Allah, Religion. If a web page has Google ads, what Google does is that it scans the content of that particular page and matches it against the repository of ads that it could display. After calculations of some metrics like quality score and other things I won't go into, Google will place the ad. This is where the word targeted comes from.
In this case, it is possible that one of the keywords was religion, and Google assessed the context to be religion and placed the ad as relevant. Another possible case is that the people behind the ad have placed Islam, hijab, Allah and such Islam-related keywords as positive keywords (rather than negative) in order to target Islamic websites and seek converts or whatever action the designers had in mind.
KJ, thanks for the comment. Yeah, I think the key words were religion and Arab(ic) since the advertised website is in Arabic. I think it's smart on the advertiser's side. Still, it looks weird :)
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