Text ads can be smart, funny, and sometimes unintentionally hilarious when they show up in the wrong context.

David, our web designer and marketing maestro here at Pingdom was surfing the web last night and put together a list of really funny and original text ads from Google Adwords. We liked them so much that we made this blog entry for your perusal. Let yourself be inspired, or if you’re not into search engine marketing, at least amused.

Not quite as intended

Contextual text ads showing up in the wrong context can be highly amusing. Travel plans to Hell, anyone?

More examples over at ROI Revolution.

Clashing interests

This one started as a joke but got the attention of Apple’s lawyers. They are very protective of their brand and forced the person behind it to remove this.

ASCII art

Great idea, and very suitable for a digital design agency. (It would have looked better in a mono-space font, though.)

And here is an example of completely changing a rental car company’s approach to text ads. The pay-off? A 47% increase in click-through.

The potentially bad part about using ASCII art in your text ads is that Google seems to be actively filtering and removing ads with ASCII art.

Extremely well targeted

When Google shares plummeted early in 2006, the following, very well-targeted ad showed up. Talk about grabbing an opportunity.

Trading words

When Jeff Gerstmann was fired from his job as editorial director at GameSpot, the event got a lot of media attention. PC Gamer capitalized on this, and gaming blog GameBump retaliated. Via Adwords.

We’re sure there are plenty of other excellent examples of text ads out there. If you have links to good ones, please do share them in comments.

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