Ad Age: New Online Advertising Model Riles Journalists

The "new" ad technology (actually implemented several times in the past six years by other companies) IntelliTXT is making journalists - a normally happy, pollyannaish lot - angry by interfering in the text of their stories. The technology turns certain sponsored words green and allows an ad to pop up when the reader rolls over the appropriate text. Thus, if this story were so instrumented, the "green" in the last sentence would be colored and perhaps pop up an image of Ralph Nader, figurehead of the Green Party. Writers are calling the technology an invasion of their turf, and effectively a form of product placement.

Consumer feedback has been slightly, but negative, mostly concentrating on the fact that the ads wind up being completely irrelevant and distracting from the text. One can imagine the fun angry journalists could have with this, juxtaposing certain words against one another to create negative branding experiences.