For my Global Communications class, we just took a test on the world map. We had to know every country and know where they are located on a blank map. I spent all week Googling countries and maps and all of the sudden, every advertisement on Facebook and Google had to do with countries that I had been googling.
I realize that advertisers do this, but it never occurred to me how quickly they did it. Normally, I would see ads for fishing or skiing things and assumed that over time advertisers had put it together. I never would have guessed that it only took a matter of a few days to narrow in on me.
Granted, this is something that has been going on for awhile, I think we forget about how prominent advertisers are in our lives. The question that I have is, how far is too far? Does anyone feel like we are always being monitored and our privacy is being invaded?
I always thought that was pretty funny, it took me a while to figure out why I was seeing the ads for my own company everywhere, on sites that were totally unrelated.
ReplyDeleteI finally caught on to the fact that there were programs that did that using your search and site history. And since I spend the majority of most days on the company's websites when I'm working.
It is interesting, I think if it was something that hadn't happened so gradually, it would be really creepy but I think that it is one of those things that I (and others) have just become accustomed to. When you think about it, it is really creepy.
I figured that out last semester during a project for my International Marketing class. At first I was astonished; I couldn't believe how relevant the advertisements could get when searching for things I normally wouldn't. When a site brings up something normal to me, even if I'm not interested, it slips my mind. However, when vacations all of a sudden are filling my side bar ads with countries that I’ve searched, it's much more noticeable. It only takes a few hours to have advertisements change to cater to you specifically. At some point marketers will have complete control of who gets what advertisement and choose who gets exposed. It's amazing how much of a science advertising has become.
ReplyDelete