Thursday, March 09, 2006

Café Press combines contextual ads with tags

I’m flying to California this morning. While I’m there, I will be attending the Techdirt Greenhouse conference, which promises to be a great event. Techdirt is a corporate intelligence company whose employees author one of the best blogs around. Yesterday, they had a must-read piece on Café Press‘s newly announced combination of contextual advertising with tagging.

While most people think of the company as a place to simply sell t-shirts, not enough people recognize how CafePress really catalogs timely events. Within hours of any major news event, it seems that someone, somewhere will have set up a Cafe Press store to sell items related to that event. Of course, with such rapid setup of timely news-related products, regular contextual advertising doesn’t necessarily work. So, instead, CafePress is offering a program where people can define specific tags, and immediately have ads for related products show up. In other words, rather than contextual ads, the ad topic can be very narrowly defined by the site owner. This certainly makes sense for the type of timely content on CafePress, but you could see it make sense elsewhere as well—where the context of the words on a site might not necessarily correctly suggest what ads should be displayed.

Like I said, Techdirt is a great daily read, and one I wouldn’t be without; add its feed to your RSS reader and you’ll see what I mean.