I don’t much like the Internet’s efforts to serve up relevant advertising to me. It’s creepy enough when, after I visit a company’s website to look at their products, I’m deluged with their ads from every website I visit for weeks thereafter, but it’s the monotony of the thing that really gets me down. If I visit a UK website, I don’t want to see another bloody ad from Meg Whitman’s insufferable gubernatorial campaign — I want to see ads for tea, or umbrellas, or PSAs condemning soccer hooliganism. Something different.
How It Works
To quickly review: There are basically two ways that ad networks customize their ads for their victims. The cruder approach is geolocation: Based upon your computer’s IP address, some knowledge of network topology, and some biggish databases, an ad network can deduce (roughly) where in the world you are, and bore you with ads from local businesses/candidates/etc. The more sophisticated approach relies on a network of co-operating sites that track your IP as you travel from site to site, reporting your movements back to the ad network s.t. it can work out your interests, and bore you with a customized suite of ads. (The ‘co-operation’ may consist of nothing more than allowing the ad network to embed its own code on the hosting site.)
Why I Hate It
Advertisers like to talk about how all this “relevant” advertising is really great for the consumer — how it’s providing him with valuable, welcome, desired information on how he can spend his money, as opposed to the annoying white noise of non-targeted advertising. This is bunk. I don’t want to be sold, and I don’t want to be annoyed, and I definitely don’t want to feel like I’m being stalked as I travel across the (virtual) world.
If you want to target ads at me, tone it down a little. Don’t serve me local ads when I’m viewing content from another country. Don’t try to pitch me on that graphing package I looked at 2 weeks ago; if I had wanted to buy it, I would have bought it then. If you want to persuade me, don’t be so pushy, and don’t be so obvious.
