In the past few weeks I have become painfully aware of how integrated my internet experience is. As soon as Kevin and I posted our engagement to Facebook, my news feed became nothing but wedding ads. Ads for dresses and shoes. Ads for engagement rings and wedding bands. Ads for venues and caterers and photographers. Ads for planning services.
This soon leaked out to other websites. No matter where I went, the majority of the advertisements I saw were wedding related. The algorithms knew I was getting married soon, and they seemed to believe that I ceased to have an interest in anything else. Gone was the daily Buffy quote that I so looked forward to on Facebook. In it's place was an announcement about some sale at David's Bridal.
Then something really strange happened. I had been poking around some department store websites to see if it would even be possible to find a reasonable wedding dress in the $200 - $400 range. I'm a long way from trying anything on, but I have some ideas about what I want, and I wanted to see how close those matched up to reality. To my surprise, I found a dress for less than $200 that I really liked. I sent a link to it to Sarah.
And then I started seeing it everywhere. Every time I logged on to Facebook, that dress was in one of the ads on the side. When I went to other sites, blogs I frequent or even news sites, there was a good chance that it would be there as well. This dress started following me around the internet, begging me to buy it.
It's been a couple of weeks, and that has mostly tapered off. I still see it once a day or so, but that's nothing compared to the days after I shared it with Sarah. In its place I'm beginning to get weight loss ads. "Tricks" for losing that extra inch before the big day or whatever. Which is possibly more disturbing.
It's a little frightening to realize the extent to which my online activity is being monitored. All it takes is one IM and suddenly Google knows exactly what wedding dress I'm considering and is trying to shove it down my throat. I'm a little surprised I hadn't noticed before just how pervasive this is. Then again, focusing all of the ads around a single topic makes these things more obvious.
I'm looking forward to the day when I'll have a bit more variety in my online ads again. I doubt I'll ever look at them the same way again, though.
Wooooooo Google Ad Sense. Google is the world's largest advertiser, mostly because they are really good at their job.
ReplyDeleteI've noticed this happening with several things I've looked at in the past months, too. It's not the IM... it's looking at the page on the department store website. Or other online retailer. Earrings and dresses I considered for my winter formal pop up all the time (still) and after a recent perusal of several online retailers that sell amusing CrossFit shirts, I see those on almost every page I visit, too. They may be trying to convince us to buy, but instead it makes those items invisible to me, and far less interesting. This is also part of why I was off Facebook for a while...
ReplyDeleteOoof! That's pretty creepy. This makes me even happier that I use ad-block. I looked at enough wedding stuff on my own during wedding planning. Although, I guess that just means that I don't know what the internet knows about me...
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