What a difference

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I've been looking at the ads I've been getting on Facebook lately. It's almost humorous...the difference between the targeted flyers and ads, and the crummy banners sold by MSN. Over the past couple days I found myself clicking on ads for Cloverfield (which I'm dying to see) and for a Star Trek ringtone. (Holy crap. I can't believe I'm clicking on banner ads.) Both were ads obviously targeted at me via interest, based on my profile data. Today, I got a banner ad advertising some sort of diabetes site. When I clicked on the ad, I was taken to a pharmaceutical company site and asked to provide information on what I use to treat my diabetes. I don't have the disease. I hopefully never will. So what, was a planning agency stupid enough to run a pharma ad in an ROS capacity across Facebook without targeting it?

Whatever the case, I find display ads of no interest to me, and flyer/news feed ads that are incredibly relevant. Facebook is doing a great job of targeting advertising. Their buddies at MSN? Not so much.

Political E-mail Stepping Up

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I get e-mail from both the Republicans and the Democrats. The Republicans think I'm still a Republican. And the Democrats seem to think I'm a guy who will write them checks regularly. I usually get something from the Republicans 2-3 times a month. The Democrats would send something 3-4 times a week, until they hit primary season. Now, the e-mails are coming several times a day. At some point, John Edwards must've gotten his mitts on the DCCC e-mail list. His campaign e-mails me at least once a day looking for donations. The DCCC e-mails at least once a day, also looking for donations. They keep it fresh by having different politicians, analysts, campaign strategists and Democratic Party superstars write the e-mails.

But they all say essentially the same thing - Thanks for donating in the past. Please donate more.

Lately, I see Cloudmark has been filtering Edwards to the trash. I'm guessing that a P2P network that is presumably divided in its political leanings will probably ID most of the political e-mails as spam, since Republicans will hit the "Block" button when they see communications from the Democrats and vice versa. Shouldn't be long now before all of them are filtered out.