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Dry cured Bacon

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Ellen West - web producer | 14:45 UK time, Thursday, 11 September 2008

One of the challenges for people producing websites is to ensure that we find what we want quickly and easily. The ideal is that we receive suggestions from sources we trust, and that our experience of the web is improved by alerts and recommendations that are tailored to our tastes. The reality is that occasionally we come across a recommendation that is laughable; when this is the case it is usually because somebody has paid to have content pushed at us. This is not an unusual occurrence, but yesterday I came across two corking examples of supposedly targeted advertising.

When searching on Amazon for information about book Looking Back at Francis Bacon (a little preparation ahead of the ) I was amused at the inclusion of a link that I "may be interested in" :

Screengrab of Amazon page on 10/09/2008

Mmm, "Real dry cured bacon" is just what I feel like after leafing through some of the artist's bloodier work. This is nothing, however, when compared with what I "may be interested in" if I for about the hunger striker Bobby Sands:

Screengrab from IMDB page for Hunger on 11/09/2008

My main concern on coming out of Hunger is obviously going to be how to emulate the trim figure attained by those plucky hunger strikers. I know that advertising allows websites to be produced without charging for content, but it does damage my impression of a site if I'm being jolted into incredulous laughter.

Has anyone else spotted particularly jaw-dropping examples of commerce elbowing in on culture?

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