Advertising to Explain Where Polygamy Isn’t

21 May 2008 @ 12:42 am | 7 comments

How bad does the Church want to explain that LDS Mormons don’t practice polygamy?  

It’s placing Google ads linking to its Newsroom article explaining that “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reiterates that it has no affiliation whatsoever with any polygamous groups.”


Mormon Church ad explaining no polygamy

I suppose it’s a cheap way to spread the message around.

(Who knows what the garments ad is all about).

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  1. Proud Daughter of Eve’s avatar

    Proud Daughter of Eve on 21 May 2008 at 6:19 pm

    Eh, it’s just a Google Ad thing. I’ve got Gmail and the little running ad link along the top frequently has “Bargain Prices on Mormon Garments!” I’m thinking of writing to them about it.

  2. Bryce Haymond’s avatar

    Bryce Haymond on 22 May 2008 at 11:26 am

    Yea, I’ve got the Church’s Google Ads running on my site. I guess they consider it an important enough issue to issue ads on the subject.

  3. NortboundZax’s avatar

    NortboundZax on 22 May 2008 at 7:15 pm

    it is curious the amount of effort the church spends to distance itself from a practice it only gave up under duress.

  4. Mike L.’s avatar

    Mike L. on 22 May 2008 at 9:30 pm

    My guess on the garment thing is that it’s just a generic ad that tries to be too smart. It sees, based on your gmail, search history, page content, etc. that you are into Mormon stuff, and then tries to figure out, based on complicated algorithms, what kind of things Mormons need, based on the content of other pages its indexed, and thus customizes the ad accordingly. Of course the complex algorithm fails to realize that Mormons would not want to buy garments online from “shopzilla”, even if they were available. I think I read something about how google uses word association heavily in its algorithms. So the word “Mormon” is strongly associated with the word “garments”, which is why you get the ad.

    So it’s nothing malicious. Just a technological anomaly. I could be wrong, though.

  5. David H. Sundwall’s avatar

    David H. Sundwall on 23 May 2008 at 9:29 am

    Mike,

    I suspect you are right. It appears to be a gimmick to just target Mormon eyeballs and lead them to various semi-related businesses. Just sneaky and not very helpful.

  6. little light’s avatar

    little light on 24 May 2008 at 11:23 pm

    i think the ad about the polygamy thing is a good move.