7-Eleven Fails With Online Execution
Thursday, February 19th, 2009
During my normal morning routine of coffee and email I noticed something unusual. This particular morning I was in the midst of adjusting my fantasy basketball lineup on Yahoo, when out of the corner of my eye I recognized a street name on an adjacent ad. It’s not very often that you see a postal address in a banner ad, much less one with a street name that you’re familiar with.
I didn’t see it coming and I certainly didn’t know it yet, but I had fallen victim to a geo-targeted campaign gone wrong. The 7-Eleven ad that grabbed my attention can be seen here on the left.
In case you were wondering where 2021 South MacArthur is, it’s in Oklahoma City, OK – approximately 1,500 miles from where I was sitting when the I saw the 7-Eleven ad. This targeting gone wrong isn’t as bad as you think and is probably not even 7-Eleven’s fault. I actually used to live in Oklahoma City and I’m sure Yahoo must have that information stored somewhere, although a quick search didn’t reveal where (not in my main profile, flickr or delicious).
This story goes from bad to worse when I went to click the ad. Click Click. Click. It’s not working. While I’m looking at the ad the following items painfully come to mind (in this order): (more…)
Tags: 7-eleven, citysearch, geo-targeting, google, spam, yahoo
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