I tried to access Twitter on the Freefi/Jiwire network here at the Oakland Airport, and kept getting weird page refreshes from the bar at the top of the screen that loads banner ads, a small and a 728×90. The thing that sucks though is that at least half the large ads and all the small ads seem to be PSAs or house ads. This is a common issue with high-frequency websites, but then again, this is not an unplanned-for situation with a service like this. Also the PSAs are interspersed with paying ads which leads me to believe that their ad network rotation is horribly misconfigured at best.

Worse - a lot of sites just won’t load - like the twitter problems above - and amazon.com is inaccessible probably because of javascript conflicts with the shitty browser bar. The pop up window for inserting images into wordpress is also broken by it.

I’ve written about this before about this service here. I would much rather pay than deal with this crap, especially for public service ads that are making nobody any money. I wonder how last this company will last with this kind of revenue model. It looks like Collective Media is providing some of the underlying advertising.

I checked out Freefi’s twitter page which hasn’t been updated since November 2009. They are apparently located in “Wooldland Hills, CA” [sic]. I’m going to tweet this post to Freefi.com and their 12 followers, and encourage them to respond :-), once I can get onto twitter from my blackberry of course.

Well someone screwed up. It happens, and goodness knows perhaps this might actually increase the response rates on your ads — but probably not. If anyone at Starwood wants to know why this ad is not working that well, it’s either the fault of:

a) The Chicago Sun-Times team, or

b) Whoever trafficks their ads, or

c) Advertising.com, the ad network who ran this ad on the page, or

d) The agency who Starwood is having run their ads (dunno who that is), or

e) Someone at Starwood trafficked it incorrectly…?

In any event - what you have is a 160×600 showing up in a 728×90 spot, and showing just enough skin for you to know it’s an ad for Westin. The URL it clicks through to (yes that does work) is http://www.starwoodpromos.com/westin-mastercard/&EM=Q3Q4_NAD_MEDIA_WS_EN_MASTERCARD

I don’t have a lot of readers, but I’d love to see the comments about where this actually got screwed up