While sitting at my desk at work (in the United States), I went to CNN’s website to check up on the status of Hurricane Katrina. At the top of the screen a typical, annoying banner advertisement was displayed:

This is a great example of how someone tried to invent some smart marketing technique, which backfired. My company’s IP address block is owned and assigned to a Canadian address. However, a vast number of our users are in the US. Yet, when we go to a site that attempts to use geographic information, it fails miserably. I always get bombarded with Candian advertisements or redirected to sites like google.ca when trying to go to their .com counterparts.

Someone’s getting rich off this marketing scam and selling it as “targeted marketing”. Bastards.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2005 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Stupid Things. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.