Last night, as I sat down in my parent’s couch to watch TV, the last think I expected was to have a conversation about Targeted Advertising with my mother.
I had chauffeured my daughter for her weekly tutoring with the local english teacher and was simply waiting the hour and relaxing. Passing the time, I turned the TV over to the G4 network to watch Ninja Warrior, as someone in the 18-34 male demographic is want to do. My father, looking up from his evening paper, remarks that he’s never seen these ads before (The one with the nearly naked women cleaning a young man as if it were a car wash was his favorite, he later told me when mom left the room). Mom replied that ‘[people our age] are suppose to be watching the evening news’.
Ads targeted to our gender, our age, our ethnicity or our respective tax bracket are old news. My parents are surprised when they see products or advertising styles that are not ‘meant’ for them. It has become conditioned in our consumption of ad-funded media to expect some form of targeting in the ads we are seeing. And yet, this is harmless. We expect to be advertised to in this way because we find it unobtrusive. We see ourselves in large, faceless groups that have just enough relavance to our personal tastes and trends as to keep advertising within the ballpark of our interests.
If only those same rules were true on the web. Those large, faceless groups are becoming ever smaller and clearer defined online. Targeted Advertising sees the possibilities of demographics of one, and they think ‘Hey that must be what we want!’ If large and general is good, small and detailed must be better, or so the logic twists. Late 90’s was the era of the adware companies. Software sitting on your machine tracked your surfing habits and targeted advertising based on the results. Turns out, people were not ok with this idea and the practice got two black eyes and labeled with nasty terms like ‘spyware’
NebuAd found a new way to revive this nasty practice. They talked smaller ISPs into letting NebuAd’s software ‘jot down’ all the websites you visited without you knowing it. They claimed that since NebuAd didn’t know who you were, it was totally ok right? Not that Congress is going to see it that way, since randomly tapping some stranger’s phone is no less illegal than tapping your roommate’s.
Ad agencies should have a sense for what is and is not invasive by now. ISPs should know better. Sadly, we should also not be as surprised as we are.