I started a Google AdWords ad for the Cafepress store, with a small budget, just to see how it did. Within 24 hours Google suspended the ad. Why? “Excessive capitalization.” Now, I happen to loathe excessive capitalization, so I can understand their watching out for this. But in this case, the “word” that was capitalized was–wait for it–“MMORPG” (used once in the title and once in the ad). Now, their own guidelines list as correct usage, “Necessary capitalization for acronym.”
This means that the person who reviewed the ad a) didn’t know what MMORPG meant and b) was incapable of realizing that a word almost entirely consisting of consonants might not actually be a word. Let’s hear it for being familiar with English usage and being willing to turn to your cubicle neighbor and say, “what’s an MMORPG?” (and realize in the process that you can’t really pronounce it as a word, therefore maybe, just maybe, it’s an acronym).
My husband’s theory is that it’s an automated filter script of some sort, which I think is made all the more plausible by the fact that this was done at precisely midnight (a good time for running scripts). However, you’d think that they’d have some sort of algorithm in there for noticing either “hey, this word is mostly consonants; it might be an acronym,” or “this word isn’t in my dictionary; I’ll kick it back to a live rep.”
Traditional edit: Naturally I emailed Google, explained the issue, and asked them to please reconsider. The wording of their reply indicated that it had indeed been a live rep who originally declined that ad (boggles, I tell you), but upon reexamination, they reactivated it. Woot.
Technorati Tags: Google, Google AdWords
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