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Thursday, January 5, 2012

2012 / Savage Love Mitt Romney Ad Appears on Spreading Santorum

Posted by Dan Savage on Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 8:41 AM

Akward! Almost as awkward Romney himself. And then there's this...

And when you visit www.spreadingsantorum.com, please be sure to click through the landing/splatting page and read the blog. Jocelyn is doing an amazing job covering Santorum in all his gory.

Comments (11) RSS

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Looks like you meant Ron Paul, Dan?

Posted by boogens on January 5, 2012 at 9:04 AM

If you follow the links, the one on the main page goes to Newsmax.com and the one on the inside (currently featuring Gingrich) goes to Townhall.com. While both of those sights are (very) right leaning, those ads were not taken out by the candidates. They're just links to Newsmax and Townhall polls.

Posted by Park on January 5, 2012 at 9:12 AM

@1, you're meant to click on his first link to see the instance that inspired his headline. Yes, once you rent your page to Google Ads its robots will sometimes make tailoring selections that briefly amuse.

Posted by gloomy gus on January 5, 2012 at 9:13 AM

But maybe there used to be a Romney ad there? Can't we talk to the webmaster at spreadingsantorum.com and find out?

Posted by Park on January 5, 2012 at 9:16 AM

This is known as the mere exposure effect, and it illustrates the worrisome fact that your implicit memory influences your interpretation of the world—which things you like, don’t like, and so on. It will come as no surprise to you that the mere exposure effect is part of the magic behind product branding, celebrity building, and political campaigning: with repeated exposure to a product or face, you come to prefer it more. The mere exposure effect is why people in the public spotlight are not always as disturbed as one might expect by negative press. As famous personalities often quip, “The only bad publicity is no publicity,” or “I don’t care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.”

Eagleman, David (2011). Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (pp. 64-65). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

http://www.amazon.com/Incognito-Secret-L…

Posted by Supreme Ruler Of The Universe

on January 5, 2012 at 9:18 AM

@4: The ad space is populated by automated algorithms that match keywords specified for the ads to keywords that appear on the site (VERY generally: they are really complex and also use things like geographic location of the user, linked sites/media, and tracking cookies, among others). As a result, one often can find really ironic ad placement (Free Thought Blogs, for example, frequently gets ads for religious services/churches, as they often discuss religion, though from a very critical perspective).

Posted by John Horstman on January 5, 2012 at 9:26 AM

hey give me some credit, dan! it's not just jocelyn!! :)

Posted by glen keenan on January 5, 2012 at 9:48 AM

@6 You know, I guess I knew that at least some ad services worked that way, but... Isn't that monumentally stupid? I mean, that's a complete waste of advertising revenue, to put the ad in a location that will do them no good whatsoever. There must be some way to take into account the tone as well as the content of both the ads and the sites with available space.

Posted by Park on January 5, 2012 at 10:14 AM