You Have Mail...

...and you also have some curious advertisements

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By Ritva Liisa Snellman
     
      Curious. Whenever I get e-mail from my daughter, airline advertisements appear in the right-hand margin of the screen. Now how do they KNOW we are planning a trip?
      This needs to be investigated a bit. What on earth are these ads that my mail-client supplier Google is pushing at me?
     
From my email at work, I send off a few test messages to my personal G-mail account.
      Test No.1: Hi, I've been thinking about buying a car. Do you know if anyone is selling mink coats on the cheap? Love, Mum.
      Result: On the right-hand side of the screen, under "Sponsored Links", there appears one message exhorting me to buy an Audi from Germany, the link to the Finnish website for Superfast Ferries, and a clutch of other car adverts.
      Test No.2: Hi, I've gone off the taste of porridge, the money's all spent, and the bailiff is at the door. I'm getting the hanging-noose greased and ready. Love, Mum.
      Result: Advertisements for dyspepsia medication and baby & infant supplies.
     
Time to switch gender and style
      Test No.3: Hi there, come to sauna. I've got the beers in. Cheers, Erik.
      Result: An advertisment for a cholesterol-lowering spread, and that same enquiry about my indigestion problems and how to cure them.
      Test No. 4: Hi, things are pretty bad. I can't get an appointment with the psychiatrist. Would drugs help? Regards, Erik.
      Result: Test how you shape up in harsh northern conditions (buy Nokian Tyres) and an ad for the Face-to-Face Institute's sales courses - something or other to do with the Finnish Fair Corporation.
     
Curiouser and curiouser. I turn to my regular IT guru, who heaves a deep sigh and blurts out a stream of words that mostly go over my head.
      I nevertheless manage to decipher something like this: "Nobody is reading your e-mail. Google lives from advertising. An algorithm looks at certain sequences or strings of words, completely anonymously. The advertiser places keywords into the programme, and the system auctions off to see whose advertisements make it through to which pages."
      Ooonnhuh... Well, now THAT opens up some completely new opportunities.
     
I slip into a more cavalier mode, because now I want a naughty advert to spice up my dull inbox.
      Test No.5: Hi, I'm looking for a little coffee and chat* in the afternoons. A bit of sex wouldn't come amiss. Cheers, Erik.
      Result: A firm selling hot drinks automats shows off its latest coffee machine model. Add to that some more baby food stuff and another margarine that will reduce my cholesterol.
     
Well, that wasn't any good, was it? Perhaps we have to put the sex first.
      Test No. 6: Hi, I'm looking for sex. I don't mind coffee and a chat, either. Cheers, Erik.
      Result: Don't go looking for a new home, just order one, says real estate firm Igglo. And then there's an advertisement that is headlined rather more promisingly: "Hip hei hutsu".
      Since "hutsu" is "slut" or "hussy" or "whore" in Finnish, and the above sentence comes out as "Hip, Hip Hussy", I do seem to be getting warmer.
      Let's see what the little hussy is being offered.
      But no. Alas, the link leads only to a company that runs a price comparison service for such things as... the cheapest plane tickets you can buy online.
      Back to square one.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 4.11.2006
     
Translator's Note: Doubtless there will have been others who are right now wondering why the dickens a firm displaying the cheapest flights (and also the cheapest online deals on such items as DVDs, mobile phone connections, broadband, digital cameras, phones, or books) would use an expression like "Hip, Hip Hussy". It is somewhat unclear, but the combination of words is also the Finnish title for a Swedish-made film called Hip hip hora, known in English as The Ketchup Effect. The teen movie is also available on DVD through the same site. Sometimes the Internet works in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform. As for the "coffee and chat", well, the Finnish expression "päiväkahviseura" (literally translated as "company for daytime coffee") is a well-established euphemism for a casual no-questions-asked dalliance on the side. Until they cleaned up their act some years ago, you could find countless small ads in Finnish newspapers where men showed an enthusiasm for drinking coffee by day. In company, of course. An equal or greater number of women were offering this kind of company.


Links:
  G-mail (Google) The mail here is about digital cameras, and so are the contextual ads.

RITVA LIISA SNELLMAN / Helsingin Sanomat
ritva.liisa.snellman@hs.fi