Oops. Take a web editor on the Financial Post, plus ad cookies that are aimed just at you and an April’s Fool joke and what do you get…a unintentional joke that goes past the noon deadline.
I saw a link on Facebook to the Financial Post’s wrap up of April Fool jokes April Fool’s Day 2014: Hey WestJet, there’s no such thing as metric time.
So I scroll down to get chuckle or three.
The way the Financial Post/National Post laid out the web page, you soon read about Distl, a Toronto developer putting a condo on the moon.
Next you see the subhead “Bye-bye beaver” and right underneath it, an ad for the controversial Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline.
Is this a joke? I ask myself. Nope the ad is a legit Northern Gateway ad.
Keep scrolling down and you find Root’s April Fools joke about replacing its iconic beaver symbol with a loon. Roots called “April Fool” on its Facebook page, saying: “Admittedly, we were a little ‘loony’ this morning. The beaver is and always will be at the heart and soul of Roots Canada! (P.S. Happy April Fools!) JF”
Of course it’s all about tracking cookies the place the ads. Someone in Toronto, Montreal or Ottawa will likely see a different ad.
But given the controversial Northern Gateway pipeline which will cross streams where beavers live, it’s also all cookie crumble for Enbridge.
(On a serious note, inappropriate ads normally would never have appeared in the old days when a human actually checked page. These days it’s always an algorithm)