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.

Have you ever wondered how much money Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Yahoo, Amazon and other tech giants have in the bank? What kind of assets do they have, how much spending money do they have? The vague answer is, “a lot.” But if you want to find out exactly how much, read on.

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Microsoft and open source, those are two things that traditionally don’t mix. Quite the opposite; the more hardcore members of the open source community tend to view Microsoft as just one step below Satan.

But while much of the open source community has little love for Microsoft, Microsoft is actually trying desperately to send some love back. The Redmond giant may have its own business reasons for doing so, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft is contributing to open source in more ways than most people are aware of.

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What do Android, Visio, Flash, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?

The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.

These products have continued to develop at their new homes, but the seed of innovation that sparked an actual, new product came from the outside. The key word here is innovation.

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We all know Google is huge and their wide range of services are bound to have a fair share of competitors, but you may be surprised just how wide-ranging Google considers its competition to be.

Here below we have included a quote from Google’s latest SEC filing with some very interesting information about what Google has to say about its competition.

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Big sites and services like Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and many others rely heavily on open source software to run their operations. Happily, this isn’t a one-way street. They are also giving back to the open source community, not just by contributing to existing projects, but sometimes by open sourcing their own internal projects, giving back something completely new.

And what these popular sites can contribute is often quite valuable. Since they tend to be very large, they run big operations and have been forced to create solutions for scalability and performance problems that most other sites simply don’t have to deal with.

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