Innovative Advertising: Chitika promoting ads featuring celebrity bloggers

Just saw these interesting ads by Chitika on few sites, featuring celebrity bloggers like Darren Rowse and Chris Pirillo (Check out the banners below).  Three years ago, I remember the the John Chow ads featured on Problogger which caught everyone’s attention for its innovative ad copy.  Now these ads do something similar, they actually use the bloggers reputation to convince that Chitika is a better alternative for Google AdSense.

What’s also interestng about these ads are that they lead to Chitika with referral URLs associated with the bloggers. This looks like a great strategy, I’m guessing there’s some agreement with the bloggers that Chitika is promoting these ads.

Nice to see such innovative ideas come by. Really cool. However, I wonder if these ads give false signals to regular people. For instance, Darren doesn’t use AdSense on his blog, but the ad says that Chitika is his second most biggest source of income, after AdSense.