When one of my colleagues sent me Google’s latest press release with the suggestion that I reference it in a future blog entry, I told him that I generally prefer to write about real things.
Apparently, he didn’t notice that the release—announcing the launch of a new service, called Google Romance—was dated April 1. Or maybe he was simply unaware that Google has a history of playing April Fool's jokes, which in past years have included announcements related to its Copernicus lunar research center, its MentalPlex search engine and its PigeonRank technology. The latter purports to rely on dense clusters of common gray pigeons “to compute the relative value of web pages faster than human editors or machine-based algorithms”.
Or maybe my colleague, somewhat of a jokester himself, was merely hoping to see me land on my face after singing praises of Google’s supposed latest twist on precision marketing.
In any case, the fictitious "Contextual Date" service almost has the makings of something real, which of course is why it works so wonderfully as a hoax. Aristotle once observed: “Plausible impossibilities should be preferred to unconvincing possibilities.” This seems a plausible possibility and maybe it’s just a matter of time before we see a contextual dating option that, as Google decribes it, “offers an all-expenses-paid romantic evening in exchange for viewing contextually relevant advertising throughout the course of the users' date”.
Tim Armstrong, Google’s VP of Advertising, once told me: “We want users to trust us for unbiased information and advertisers to trust us for contextual placements.” No doubt, some companies would pay a hefty premium for contextual placements targeted to individuals at different stages of a romantic relationship—with the "breakup stage" probably offering the greatest commercial value!
Given the right incentives, I’m sure some people would welcome the intrusion (yes, even context-sensitive marketing can be intrusive), although perhaps less so during a first date. On second thought, don't some reality shows have entire camera crews hovering over them during the first date?
Google Romance offers the following FAQs:
6. What is Contextual Dating?
It’s a free date plus the added accrued value of the past decade’s worth of post-Industrial Age online marketing genius, all tied into a real-time, video-based, GPS-tracked, psychographically astute and environmentally pervasive promotional system.
7. Come again?
You see ads that might make your date better.
8. Such as?
Flowers. Music. Personal advice. E-greetings. Later on, depending on how our long-term opt-out natural-language-based monitoring system thinks things are going, personalized thank you notes, romantic getaway offers, various intimate pharmaceutical come-ons, engagement and bridal wear catalogs – you know the drill.
9. What if I don’t want to see contextual dating ads?
Don’t use the product.
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