The Problem With Contextual Targeting

In principal it sounds like such a good idea.  Read the words on a page and run ads that fit contextually with those words.  In practice, it often doesn’t work or worse, the context backfires.

A good example is the post I did on Firefox popups.  I was commenting/complaining about a popup ad for a Panasonic product.  If you read that post in an RSS reader, you got an ad for a Panasonic product.

I doubt that’s a context Panasonic would be happy with.  And I am not so happy with it either.