Update - It seems the campaign has been cancelled (see, eg, Frank Helmschrott’s blog (in German)). Currently, I can no longer see the ad when googling for my name. But -

You may try for yourself. I’m not sure about the legal situation in this case, after all, there are a couple of other people who legitimately respond to my name. Carsten Ulbricht has a quick legal analysis regarding the question of the applicable privacy legislation on his blog (edit: in German). His suggestion, that German law is applicable in this case since German and European privacy regulations cannot be waived by accepting the facebook terms of services may be correct. It still begs the question if facebook has actually used member names (and then possibly violated privacy regulations) or simply combinations of first and last names, possibly “inspired” by the actual names in its database.

But still, it’s feels dodgy to find an advertisement for facebook when you’re googling your name. If the initial reaction of the German blogosphere is any indication, this will at least be the first communications problem facebook faces in its still recent attempt to gain market share in Germany. Someone in this comment thread is suggesting sending facebook an invoice for the use of their name in an ad – if there’s a serious legal rationale for that, I might well do it ;).

Until then, if you’re part of the club – and a member of facebook -, why not join the facebook group protesting this strategy?

Im Fall dieser Podiumsdiskussion wurde das Thema am Kommunikationsverhalten des noch jungen von Bloggern aus dem Umfeld von Spreeblick.de gegründeten Blogwerbenetzwerks “adical” abgearbeitet. Dabei ging die entscheidende Information fast unter: Die von Adical vermarkteten Blogs hatten in den letzten drei Quartalen 2007 ein Werbevolumen von 250.000 Euro. Die Verteilung der Summe dürfte sicher sehr ungleich sein, aber auch das erscheint weniger bedeutend ob der Tatsache, daß, laut Auskunft des Adical-Vertreters Sascha Lobo, Mediaagenturen TKP-Preise im mittleren zweistelligen Bereich für Bloginhalte als nicht unangemessen bewerten, auch wenn die Zielgruppenmetriken bei Blogs bei weitem (noch) nicht so präzise sind wie bei anderen Onlinevermarktern und das Management von Kampagnen – selbst mit einem Aggregator zur Reduktion von Transaktionskosten – in einem tendenziell immer distribuierten Medium notwendig komplizierter ist als bei anderen Medien.

Das, finde ich, sollte für die Zukunft von Blogwerbung in Deutschland deutlich positiv stimmen.

Germans have a general, if somewhat unfair, reputation for humourlessness.

Unfair indeed… we can even lough about ourselves, and even if the jokes aren’t meant to be backhanded compliments like it’s the case in Citroen’s new C5 spot, produced by EuroRCSG for the British market, and currently available on the net and in cinemas across the British Isles. By the way, when I heard the “unmistakably German” voice over, I realised something else – the car reminded me of the Audi A4… I doubt that’s an association Citroen had in mind.

But back to the the jokes visible to everyone – here’s the youtubed version – enjoy your dose of Germanic clichés.

Eine offensichtlich ernst gemeinte Kontaktanzeige an einem Schwarzen Brett, die zumindest die Aufmerksamkeit meiner Kamera auf sich zog.

Soviele Fragen diese Anzeige auch aufwerfen mag, eines scheint mir recht sicher: Sollte sich wider Erwarten doch eine Frau auf diese Anzeige hin melden, dann wird sie wohl entweder wirklich “böse” sein, oder aber “eine ganz Liebe” mit einem mehr als verständnisvollen Humor. Dar Inserent mag sich vielleicht über seine Präferenzen nicht ganz im Klaren sein, aber er hat, so scheint mir, mit Text und Gesamtanmutung seiner Anzeige, ob nun zufällig intuitiv oder ganz bewußt, den richtigen Ton für jede der angesprochenen Zielgruppen gefunden.

Maybe they should not only try to see blog posts as a content unit, but also offer a possibiltiy to adjust the speed of ad-content adjustment to avoid temporary outliers like the pope-related one…

These days, whereever I go, bad advertisement seems to multiply around me. Is it me, or is the quality of the common German advertisement getting worse, if at all possible?

Well, from my experience, whoever claimed this correlation was probably just lucky. Personally, I can’t really see any change in the clickthrough rates – it’s still in the 0.1 % range, although other google ad users claim to have far better rates.

So I can confidently announce that this is not a money making blog, as opposed to the ones mentioned in this cyberjournalist report. But then again, it is also true that my little proto-diary has not yet shredded the career of any prominent politician…

For the moment, the average daily “turnover” of this blog reflects what it means to me – my very own two cents (well, Dollar cents…).

On the other hand, if this service is used as sluggishly on other sites as it is here, then I very much doubt its economic viability… oh, and by the way, at the current clickrate I will only need to keep this site for another 49 and a half years to receive my first check from google ;).