Right now on the CNN webpage, the banner ad is for a Microsoft Black Friday sale. AFAIK, ‘Black Friday’ is the day after Thanksgiving. Is there another ‘Black Friday’ of which I am not aware?
Microsoft is fond of redefining anything already in use. Because they long since decided that they determine all the standards. I’m still pissed off about Word 2.0 or whatever-it-was in the Mac System 6 era when they decided that, contrary to all the other programs then in existence, Command-SHIFT-B would make something bold and Command-SHIFT-I for italics.
Maybe Microsoft’s ad department forgot to take those Black Fridays ads down. Or perhaps they tried, but put up the ads on too many sites and the one on CNN slipped through their radar.
Or, if you’re into more sinister conspiracy theories, CNN doesn’t care as long as Microsoft keeps paying them for the ad space, and Microsoft keeps these ads up in order to hook suckers into paying normal prices for a non-existent sale.
Possibly a mis-trafficked ad, though if it was meant to run on or around the actual Black Friday, it’s like two months out of date, and should have been long ago pulled from their media placement service’s inventory.
They’re getting ahead of the curve.
That’s not how media buying works. Microsoft will pay for specific spaces for a specific period of time, after which the ad team at CNN will sell the space to someone else.