Adwords adds insult to injury in Fitness First PR crisis

A PR crisis is brewing for UK gym chain Fitness First. You can read all about it here and here (thanks to Stephen Waddington for flagging).

But something that struck me about the article wasn’t in the copy itself but in the Google generated ads at the bottom of the article.

The first time I looked at the story the top ad was for Fitness First. Probably not the kind of message they’d like their ads to appear alongside. It could even be considered a little embarrassing - even crass - advertising on such an article, should people not realise such ads are automatically generated.

It made me realise Google could improve its ad offering considerably by building sentiment analysis into the Adwords engine.