Perhaps there's some kind of Baader-Meinhof phenomena going on here.
When a targeted ad is creepily accurate and on point, people flip and think that the machines have figured us out. But the ads that are irrelevant just fly by us without a hit. The one-out-of-a-hundred ads that get it right, likely due to an ad targeter's lucky strike, are the ones that get under our skin, and the only ones we really notice.
I read somewhere (can’t remember the book name unfortunately) that Tesco in the UK faced this problem when they started sending out personalised coupon booklets based on loyalty card purchases. People were freaking out. Then they started adding coupons to the booklet designed to be irrelevant - say if they figured out that someone was newly pregnant, they’d send a few pages of baby stuff, but also inject lawn mower coupons and stuff only men would care about. That achieved the whole targetted effect and avoided looking creepy for just a few pennies more.
> I read somewhere (can’t remember the book name unfortunately) that Tesco in the UK faced this problem when they started sending out personalised coupon booklets based on loyalty card purchases. People were freaking out. Then they started adding coupons to the booklet designed to be irrelevant - say if they figured out that someone was newly pregnant, they’d send a few pages of baby stuff, but also inject lawn mower coupons and stuff only men would care about. That achieved the whole targetted effect and avoided looking creepy for just a few pennies more.
> As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.
> ...
> “With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.
I remember during college I was working at Tesco, and a customer way buying a lot of baby food, and she had received some Clubcard coupons for them. I asked her if she had grandchildren, she said no, but her husband really likes baby food.
But do people generally think that targeted ads are especially accurate? If anything, I’d think people are bothered by all that privacy invasion and still getting completely irrelevant ads!
God forbid you accidentally click on the wrong product in a re-targetting carousel. Now "the advertising complex" thinks I'm super into motorbikes. I don't even have a license.
IMO many people managing ads do not seem to use it properly. I worked for a marketing agency once and we got pretty good results, but we tried to understand our target, use negative keywords, use different ads for different keywords and so on. It was actually a lot of work. I guess some people wants to cut corners and just gets the client money and puts it down into adwords and fb ads, write some reports and pass it to client. In my experience clients most of the time get confused with so much jargon, and they are unable to link sales with marketing expending correctly, the only certain thing they know is that (for most of them) if they don't do marketing sales will go down over time.
I'm always surprised when I see a company wasting money on adwords when they are also ranking many #1 keywords organically, specially on brand keywords. I may be outdated but I doesn't make any sense to me.
I want to echo this. I need a new bag and gym clothes. Instagram is hitting me hard with this. I haven't consciously shopped for them either, but I assume I've looked at enough content to get me in those buckets. I am considering getting one of the bags they've shown me.
When a targeted ad is creepily accurate and on point, people flip and think that the machines have figured us out. But the ads that are irrelevant just fly by us without a hit. The one-out-of-a-hundred ads that get it right, likely due to an ad targeter's lucky strike, are the ones that get under our skin, and the only ones we really notice.