By now you’ve probably gotten wind of the KFC ad heard round the world (embedded below). If not the Guardian has a pretty good write up on the facts of the case.
Let me quickly sidestep the racism issue and allow you to make your own decision.

This ad was only meant to run in a specific locality. So the creators theoretically only needed to hold it up against a certain set of social norms and mores within the Australian/New Zealand area. But the ad inevitably found its way to YouTube. Americans with their own set of social norms and mores took one look at the ad and cried fowl (sorry, I had to).

Although we Americans are accustomed to exporting our culture, we rarely see someone else’s culture exported to us, particularly not one that, on the surface, seems so similar even if it is deeply different. The Australian arm of KFC ended up pulling the ads due to the American fury, not Australian. In fact many Australians attempted to defend the ad as light hearted and sports team related. They explained that the stereotypes Americans saw furthered in the ad don’t exist in Australia. Australians also seemed less than happy that Americans could so easily push their own agenda, even through chicken.

There are two major takeaways from this
1. Any ad, no matter how regionally focused, can become global on the Internet. Either putting your brand on the defensive in all parts of the world for serious allegations perhaps unrelated to the ad’s intent, or, when done correctly, can spread your brand’s greatness to the ends of the Earth.
2. Americans (and people in general) attempt to put every piece of marketing into their own context i.e. the audience brings something to the ad, whether it’s knowledge of the predominant teams in a particular sport or several hundred years of oppressive stereotypes.

Getting great results from the Google content network doesn’t have to be difficult, but it can get tricky if you treat it the same way you would a search campaign.  Too often people either just turn on content in a search campaign or duplicate the search campaign as a content targeted campaign.  This often leads to less than optimal results.  In order to avoid creating a content targeted campaign that isn’t setup for success, there are a few easy steps that can be taken which involve using free tools.

The first step relates to your keywords.  In the content network, you can generally use broader keywords than you do for search targeted campaigns and still get great results.  This will allow your campaign to have a greater reach within your target audience.  Finding these broader keywords is simply a matter of using the keyword research tools that are available from the search engines.

Once you have your keywords set, the second step is finding specific sites that are relevant to your campaign and can be targeted through the content network.  A great tool to use is Google Ad Planner.  Ad Planner can be used to find similar audiences to your site and find sites that relate to the keywords in your campaign.

To find sites that relate to the keywords in your campaign, simply add a list of keywords from your campaign into the tool and it will return related sites.  You can then refine the list of sites using a variety of filtering options to find the most relevant sites for your campaign.  You then simply add these sites in as managed placements in your campaign.

You can also use Google Ad Planner to find sites that have a similar audience to your site.  To do this, you enter in your domain and it will return demographic data for you site as well as other sites visited by visitors who come to your site.  This will allow you to then use the tool to find sites that have similar audiences to your site.  These can then also be targeted as managed placements in your campaign.

Lastly, you should make use of your web analytics data to find relevant sites to target through the content network.  Go through your list of top referring sites and see which ones are driving high quality traffic.  Put a list of together of those that are driving great traffic and then see if you can target them specifically through the content network.

Once you’ve gone through these simple steps, you’ll be ready to launch your content targeted campaign.  Once the campaign has launched, you’ll have to make sure you’re very vigilant in optimizing the performance of the campaign in order to maximize your results.