Clever ASCII AdWords Ads Vanish From Google

By WebProNews Staff - Wed, 01/09/2008 - 11:35

No driving traffic with ASCII cars!

A German car rental agency took a novel approach with its AdWords campaign, one that likely got their campaign, at minimum, dropped from AdWords. Clever ASCII AdWords Ads Vanish From Google

Clever ASCII AdWords Ads Vanish From Google

Though text ads appearing alongside Google's search results do not bring images with them, German rental firm Sixt.de found a novel way of getting around that problem.

A post at MindValley Labs blog noted the use of ASCII art by Sixt.de as a way of setting its ads off against the competition.

The tweak appeared when searching Google's German site for 'mietwagen'. Ad designers used the available text space for the AdWords spot to make pictures of cars out of common ASCII characters.

Compared to the usual selection of plaintext ads showing up next to Google search, the cheeky zooming vehicle ads stood out nicely.

Unfortunately, this ad campaign appears to have run its course, likely due to a Google takedown. AdWords content policy does not exclude the use of ASCII art in its assortment of banned practices, however.

News Tags: Search, Advertising, Google, ASCII Art, AdWords

1 Comment

By Mario (WPN reader) - Tue, 01/15/2008 - 14:11

Ascii Adsense

Hi, after reading about this I created an ad like that for my site which is also auto related (http://www.boing.ro). You can see the print screen here http://www.boing.ro/Ascii.jpg or you can go to www.google.ro and search for "masini". The ad is set to be shown only for romanian language and for that particular search term. If you find it please do not click on it as it does not have a big budget allocated. It is made just for fun. The ad is very fresh so it didn't got disabled by google until now.