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.