I’ve talked briefly in the past about the company you keep, and the inherent dangers of not keeping the right company.

Ads aren’t that different either. If you sell elegant orchid flowers intended to be used as a corsage at wedding or formal affair, would you advertise your orchids in the next issue of “Kung-Fu Fighting”?

And if you sell car-parts, do you think a wedding magazine is going to do you any good?

These are obviously rhetorical questions here, but if you’re using contextual ads, this might be exactly what you’re doing.

And what do I mean by this? And what does Microsoft Windows and D-Con rat poison have to do with mixing bad company ? And how do contextual ads come into play?

Like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words – I think this image just might leave you speechless.

Windows is Rat Poison

I’ve heard of strange contextual ads showing up, but nothing as remarkable and blatantly mis-matched as this one.

I must say, I laughed hard when I saw this, and was afraid I was going to hit the wrong keys while I took a screen capture.

So what exactly are contextual ads? They are the ads that you see in websites, like Google ads, that evaluate your site and try to match ads to your content, to create a theme of ads around your content that might be of interest to the readers of the article. The idea is that the better matched the article to the ads, the more targeted the potential buyer.

For instance, if you are reading about the latest Internet marketing techniques, you might find some ads about how to make money worth your time.

However, if from this same site, there are ads about surfboards, you’re not getting a well targeted ad – just like the rat poison ad that is displayed with the Microsoft article.

So as you’re out there marketing your products and services, make sure you know exactly where you’re advertising – otherwise you might be keeping the company of rat poison.