A Crazy Santorum/Google/Keyword-Based Advertising Theory
Ok readers. I need your help. I am not a regular Daily Show watcher, but I know some of you are. So quick, someone tell me — when did KY start running advertisements on the webcast?
This is more important than it might sound to you at first.
Because the world of internet advertising is always a bit of a murky one. It’s not like television, where you can figure out who paid the most for their ad slots based on show times. Money’s clearly changing hands somewhere, but there also seem to be bizarre, keyword-based tie-ins, so that occasionally you wind up with an ExxonMobil spot directly before an episode of The Rachel Maddow Show that talks about oil subsidies and references Exxon by name.
Hence my question about The Daily Show. Because I don’t watch it regularly, but did pull up a clip from Facebook yesterday. And the clip used Rick Santorum’s name liberally. And the advertisement before the clip was for KY jelly.
We see where we’re going with this, yes?
If you don’t it’s because you’re not familiar with Rick Santorum‘s little Google problem.
To make a long story short, he said some things about gay people that were not very respectful. So a particular gay man with a particularly large online following decided to use the power of Google to redefine Rick Santorum‘s name as a word, and that word (as you can see if you click through) does have a certain relationship to personal lubricant.
So.
If you’ve connected all the dots with me here, you can see why it would be totally awesome if some keyword-based engine in a dusty old server farm somewhere chugged through the Daily Show transcripts before air-time, saw the word “Santorum” used a bunch of times, and concluded that viewers would be interested in personal lubricant products.
Because the terms are related, ya know?
I would be fascinated to hear from anyone who can lend credence to or (less exciting but still helpful) disprove this delightful theory. Got an in on web-based TV advertising and how it’s scheduled? Seen lube ads on The Daily Show long before Rick Santorum‘s sudden surge from behind?
Yes, I did that on purpose. But leave a comment anyway, if you can help us shine some light into this dark and mysterious cavern of…yeah, okay, I’ll stop now.
…Santorum!
Hee hee hee.
We watch the webcast fairly regularly, and I while we’ve maybe seen some KY ads before (I know I’ve seen them somewhere, but not sure exactly which webcast show they were associated with), there are not a particularly frequent Daily Show advertiser.