Mike On Ads

Matt Cannon sent this one over to me yesterday afternoon. He saw Google showing this lovely ad for MediaMan on mashable.com at about 1pm EST. MediaMan has been identified a long time ago as a malvertisement so it’s a surprise to see them popping up on the Adsense network. Details are below. Now I’m not posting this to shame Google (I’m sure their content team has already pulled this ad) — I’m posting this more as a call to action. It’s time that we start grouping together as an industry to help stop this. More thoughts coming on that shortly.

Screengrab of ad on Mashable:

Source of the ad (warning I would not open this if I were you):
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/imgad?id=CLK8lreVvKyciwEQ2AUYWjIIqyqX6hvFaHc

Screengrab of the ad:

And for the first time in a while (probably because I’m in Moscow!) I actually got the actual trigger, and got this nice popup:

and was redirected to this lovely landing page:

Pete Warden took my little hack and modified it to go to another level — integrating the search results with the del.ico.us API to generate a “tag cloud” of sites you have been to. What’s interesting is that (at least for me) the tags were pretty accurate. It’d be interesting to do this with actual browsing history (not just the top 10k) and some incorporation of frequency & recency.

Check it out!

This is a fairly well known problem in the industry — you target a keyword, say ‘travel’, thinking that you will end up on searches & sites relating to travel. Next thing you know you end up next to a New York Times article talking about the recent plane crash in Lima and how it’s limiting travel to South America — oops

Well — the same thing happened to my blog today and good old Mr. John McCain. Although I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising, I found it slightly ironic that John McCain was advertising next my blog post criticizing his advertisements. See the bottom left on the following screenshot:

And the landing page:

Now first off — these ads look much better than before — maybe they read my earlier post? Now I am incredibly curious whether or not these ads are ROI positive in that they bring in more money in donations than is being spent on media. Anybody know??

Saw this John McCain ad on a random blog this evening:

Reminds me greatly of the giveaways you normally see on myspace… seems they forgot to leave out the “get a free lecture on public policy!!”.

Landing pages even look the same — a simple form with a ZIP & email. I wonder if they’ll sell my email address for $2.00 and use my Zip for later retargeting later.

What’s interesting though is that it looks like the McCain campaign is doing some serious remarketing on “clickers”. There are pixels there for the Right Media Exchange, Ad.com’s Leadback and Atlas!

I spoke at AdMonsters 360 last week about Malvertising (aka Errorsafe). It was a great session (at least I enjoyed it). I’ve included the powerpoint presentation I put together below, feel free to chop up, re-use do whatever you with it.

Downloadable PPT version: admonsters-presentation-2008-06-16

I was just browsing on my gender test blog post and noticed the following ad:

So normally you’d say — so what mike, it’s just an ad for senseo! Well this ad is special because I was just searching for Senseo coffee pods earlyt his morning (both via Google & Amazon.com). I find it highly unlikely that this is a pure coincidence. Here’s the clickstream (broken into multiple lines and shortened for legibility):

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/adclick?sa=L&ai=BSrzSV[...]
http://www.sharesenseo.com/index.jsp?q=a-googlewomen

Funny that there is a nice “q=a-googlewomen” inserted into the landing page — I swear the gender test showed me to be a man!! So this is all purely speculative of course, but if this is indeed true then we suddenly have the world’s best behavioral display network to compete with.

Currently experiencing some site issues (Error 500 codes). If you see this, hit refresh a few times and page should appear after a few tries.

Really should move this site to some better hosting… maybe a cloud provider!

This post by Carsten Cumbrowski on data-flow in affiliate marketing gives some good insight into the inefficiencies of the affiliate marketing world. The diagrams (see below) look very similar to display — too many tiers of aggregators primarily dealing with massive segregation, lack of standards and inefficiencies.

Thanks to Paul Cook for the initial link to this fascinating little javascript script Social History. Thes cript analyzes the css color of various links to determine whether or not the user has been to that site. If the link has the “visited” style, then he marks the user as having been to that site. Now the Social History implementation of this is rather innocuous — it’s a clever way of only displaying only the sharing buttons of sites that the user is an active participant of. Of course there are far more interesting applications for advertising.

One of the things that I always wanted to do but never got around to was to analyze a user’s browsing history to estimate age and gender. Of course the idea is definitely not new, in fact Xerox (of all companies??) has a patent on the whole process and I’m certain plenty of networks already do something of the sort… but what the heck, let’s have some fun!

So what I did is I modified the SocialHistory JS so that it polled the browser to find out which of the Quantcast top 10k sites were visited. I then apply the ratio of male to female users for each site and with some basic math determine a guestimate of your gender. The math is really quite simple, I just take:

1 / (1 + r_1 * r_2 * … * r_n)
where p_i is the ratio of men-to-women for the specific site. For example, if you had been to two sites that had a 2-1 ratio of men to women, the probability of you being female would be:
1 / (1 + 2 * 2) = 1/5 = 20%

Ok, so Click the button to give it a shot (those of you using RSS readers probably need to click this link to open this post in a browser):

UPDATE: This takes a while on Internet Explorer — please be patient (or try FireFox)

Kind of cute right? Don’t worry — I am not storing your history in any way, this is purely for fun. I’d appreciate it if you paste the resulting probabilities in the comments together with your actual gender, I’m interested to know the accuracy of this simplistic approach. In case it isn’t obvious — please don’t do this for real.

UPDATE: I’ve disabled comments for this post, as there are simply too many!

Just placed an order on Seamlessweb and received this nice warning after placing the order:

OOPS! Seems Yahoo forgot to renew it’s security certificates. Do you have a process in place to secure to ensure your domain names and associated security certificates are always up to date? How about 3rd party monitoring of your service? Now this little warning is a nuisance compared to what happened to perl.com when a domain that was used for serving on the site was registered by a hacker.