Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock
Friday, Aug. 19, 2005: The latest innovation in Internet advertising is a boon to humor columnists.
Maybe it’s not the absolute newest improvement but now widespread is a customization factor: You open a newspaper Web site’s article on, for example, gardening, and a couple of ads on the same page will be from companies in landscaping or mail-order bulbs.
The boon for wits is irony. James Lileks up in Minneapolis wrote in his newspaper column last week about drip coffee makers, inventing their evolution to being drippy messes no matter what innovations. Below the copy are two ads for coffee makers. If the retailers only knew.
Jon Carroll of San Francisco just wrote about modern funerals comprising mostly upbeat eulogies. His take was he wants people to miss him, not celebrate his memory when he goes — wailing would be nice, to him, in this soft but effective satire. One ad on this column is a shopping spot for condolence gifts, and the other offers lessons in dealing with grief.
I haven’t researched this thoroughly, but when you click onto a plane crash story, do Orbitz and Travelocity pop up?
OK. No plane crash stories on the S.F. Chron’s sfgate.com. But the slaying of a 90-year-old monk in Europe brought an ad on how to buy a list of area sex offenders. (This had nothing to do with that.)
An article about joint Russian-Chinese military exercises brought up an ad on dating Russian women and another on where to buy Chinese military equipment (!?).
Back to Lileks’ Star-Tribune: Its Northwest-union negotiations did bring up an Expedia ad on good fares from that airline. Its article on Israel closing Gaza settlements brings an ad that says “Order Israeli food online.”
You can’t make this stuff up. Maybe humor columnists can’t improve on it. -30-
