But much like the example of contextual advertising gone wrong a couple weeks ago, when an ad saying "put your feet up" ran side-by-side with an article about severed feet on CNN.com, politicians are getting themselves in hot water with contextual ads showing up in inappropriate places.
The most recent example, highlighted today by CNN, is ads for Republican nominee John McCain appearing on "Web sites that have vilified Barack Obama as unpatriotic and, in one case, compared the Democratic nominee-in-waiting to Adolf Hitler." In turn, the McCain campaign pulled the ads, claiming they had no idea they were running on sites such as Stop-Obama.org and and Obama WTF.
In turn, you end up with embarrassing mismatches like the "put your feet up" ad, and in this case, what looks like an attempt by John McCain to endorse the opinions of radical opponents of Barack Obama. And, with the McCain ads, you're most likely dealing with a demographic that has no idea about how contextual advertising works, and in turn, thinks McCain is being malicious, when in reality, he probably had no idea the ads would run next to highly controversial content that was attacking the Illinois Senator.
As CNN points out, McCain is not the first candidate to have run into issues with contextual advertising. Obama previously caught a black eye of his own when ads appeared next to a book about "pro-Israel activists hold[ing] undue sway over U.S. foreign policy," while former candidate Mitt Romney had ads pop up on Gay.com.
Considering how closely every action is watched in the Presidential campaigns, it would seem like contextual advertising is just rife with opportunities for pundits to spin unintended awkward situations into a controversy with the non-Web savvy public. On the other hand, getting the word out online has been more important than ever this year, and removing contextual ads from the campaign strategies could put either one of the candidates at a disadvantage.