For anyone following this thread, my fascination with the Spam Primavera Incident has caused me to spend much more time digging into the way Google Gmail really works.  So, instead of just being a total waste of time, I end up learning some new things.  That’s a good thing.

The area of Gmail where I was presented the link for “Spam Primavera” is populated by a content placement function called Web Clips.  This content may include content-matched PPC ads (I knew this), Gmail-specific content such as tips and tricks (I had seen this, too), but also “custom content” (something I didn’t really know about).

Apparently, this custom content is sometimes written at the discretion of the Gmail product teams.  Who, somewhat surprisingly, have a sense of humor.  Miriam Schneider, Associate Product Marketing Manager discussed what happened to cause this on Google’s Gmail blog.

“Turns out that when they came up with the idea for Web Clips, they didn’t think it made sense to show these RSS feeds and ads in the spam folder. After all, these clips should be useful and fun, but spam (of the email variety) is neither of these things. Not knowing what to put here, Keith searched for “spam recipes” and decided to make a feed out of the results. As he said, “it was just one of those late night ideas” — probably a consequence of too many said energy drinks.”

So, it looks like this chapter is now over.  I wasn’t seeing a PPC ad, afterall.  Thankfully, there isn’t a company out there that is truly this bad at running an Adwords account (or, at least not showing up in my Gmail spam folder).  Instead, it was Google having some fun.

Think the people at Hormel (the makers of Spam luncheon meat) are getting a bunch of free traffic from this?  Today, their stock is at a healthy $37 a share.  I guess you could credit this on the recession driving people to eat at home more often and purchase more canned meats, but I like to think all these Gmail users seeing new and inventive ways to cook with Spam is also having a positive affect.

On May 27th, I wrote a post about content targeting of PPC advertising on Google Gmail.  Specifically, it was about an ad I saw for Spam Primavera.  It seemed to me that this ad was demonstrative of a few things going wrong at the same time:

• Content match on Gmail was reading the page navigation (the word ’spam’ only appeared on the folder name) instead of only reading my unique content
• The advertiser was opted into content match, but was not controlling it (using negative keywords or advanced match types to limit what the keyword ’spam’ might match to).  Having the negative keyword ‘email’ might have been a smart move
• The idea that anyone would make a pasta dish with Spam luncheon meat is pretty repulsive, even though I understand it is a useful source of preserved protein in some other parts of the world

A long time ago, I followed a thread by Matt Cutts of Google where he talked about that day’s Googleplex cafeteria option, bacon polenta.  The SEO community responded by trying to trump Matt’s top ranking for the niche phrase.  DarkSeoLabs “Google Washed” him from the SERPs.  It got kind of nasty, but very interesting.  So, just for fun, I got in the game too.  I wrote a post entitled “I just want to rank for Bacon Polenta, too” (note, this was before I launched paperclipmarketing 2.0 and decided to wipe out all my historical archives).  I think in it’s hayday, the post reached the second page of search results.

I was thinking about this today, and out of curiousity did a search for Spam Primavera.  Funny, I should find a few posts where other SEM bloggers talked about seeing this same ad, and what it meant for advertising on Gmail. 

So, since I’ve long given up trying to rank for Bacon Polenta, I’ve decided instead to try ranking for Spam Primavera. 

Maybe not as tasty, certainly not as competitive, but still probably a lot of fun.