europeforvisitors - 1:12 am on Aug 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

Right that is true no doubt. But in Adwords the audience may not be what they get due to keyword targeting rather than market and media targeting. The ad you were referring to is a general ad.

No, it was a targeted ad for a general consumer product.

Some ads you will see will target specific demographics within that audience such as age, sex, income or whatever they wish. This may be a turn off for many main stream advertisers as there is less control in the adsense market.

Of course, but many other ads are targeted by topic. An ad for amateur-radio antennas, for example, will run in QST Magazine because that's the #1 ham magazine. Demographics are irrelevant: It doesn't matter if the reader is 18 or 80, male or female, making $20,000 a year or $100,000 as long as he may be a prospect for a triband beam.

Especially with the tiny little 1 sentence ads.

Don't forget Google's new "image ads," which are available only on the content network, not on Google SERPs. IMHO, these were introduced not to give more choices to current PPC advertisers, but to sell contextual advertising to mainstream advertisers and ad agencies.

Again we are back to control.

I'm all for advertiser control, and I don't think there's any doubt that Google will have to--and will--offer more advertiser controls in the future than it does now. AdSense is a first-generation product, and we can expect to see evolutionary changes and product extensions in the months and years ahead.