The problem with contextual advertising

Contextual advertising is great. It makes sense that if I am viewing a web page about cars it’s fairly likely I would be interested in advertisements for cars. Sometimes the algorithm gets it wrong, though. Or if not wrong at least a bit inappropriate.

Today the Guardian ran an article about Steve Jobs’s unprecedented letter about his health; he has been suffering from a “hormone imbalance” that has caused him to lose weight over the last year. The Guardian run AdSense at the bottom of their articles and what ads did Google select?

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