Almost as good as when I went to Home Depot and the next day I got an email asking me to rate my experience during my recent visit. That creeped me out so much I removed the app from my phone and forced logout on all devices. I have not been back since. And no, I did not pay using a Home Depot card and I am not part of any rewards program with them. Just eeew. If you advertise to me, I will ignore your product and buy something else. If there is not an alternative, then I will either plug my nose and buy it assuming that it is a need, otherwise I go without.

The targeted advertising bubble cannot pop soon enough.

Y'all need to go on the dark web, people are gambling millions on humidifier vs. dehumidifier battles, the videos are disturbing and end dry or moist.

A very annoying feature of that company. Always trying to sell you what you just bought, sometimes at a lower price its like theyre saying HA HA you got screwed

I've been recently rewatching all the X-men movies in order on Disney+.

After each one it's like "why not watch the first one again?" like it doesn't know full well I watched it a few days ago.

All this data collection, and for what?

Round here we tend to buy dehumidifiers. Why would someone intentionally increase the humidity in their home? That way lies mo[u]ld

My partner found the wedding bands they wanted to buy. They're metal bands in the design of para cord as I was in the military at the time and their father is a retired Lieutenant-colonel. The two of them together was like $150 and we got them off Etsy.

For nearly a month after I bought them for us, my phone was giving me ads for wedding rings. Like... Bro, we got them already. We don't need more.

Similarly:

We've been tracking you for decades now. We know your location at all times. We know about the humidifier you bought. We know you do everything in English, but we also know you're trying to learn Spanish. We know who your family members are based on your interactions with them, and we have vast databases on them too. We know about the plane ticket to Turkey. We know about the new bathing suit you bought. We know about the English language guidebook you bought for Turkey.

We know you're now in Turkey on your vacation.

Here's an ad in Turkish for a humidifier sold in a Turkish store.

You go to a different country, and despite the massive privacy invasions, and the terabytes of data they have about every aspect of your lives, they think you speak the local language and show you ads you can't even understand for products you'd never buy while there on a vacation.

#NotHumidiferAdvice

My hypothesis is that they sell that you searched for a humidifier (more or less) and they don't update it with you having bought one. Probably because it's difficult for the folks buying the ads to deduce if it actually results in a sale. They're likely only seeing impressions and clicks. And the folks selling the ad space don't care, because why would they? An ad is an ad. They aren't really incenticized to.

They should push you to buy a dehumidifier. Then you can put them on opposite sides of the room for humidity wars.

You can never be too humid.

Seriously, though, is this bullshit actually effective enough to justify all the money and effort they put into it?

I really doubt it. I think targeted ads are just window dressing to hide the real reason they want to spy on us everywhere all the time.

You want one? Why not a bunch! Buy buy buy! /s

Yup, I just bought a tank jet printer, so clearly I'm turning my apartment into the world's most inefficient print shop.

After reading an article about ad metrics I realized this is ad fraud.

What is going on is a business buys ads and pays one rate for ads shown but pays a higher rate if the ads resulted in a conversion (a sale). But the ad contracts are monthly or longer. So a business buys ads for their product and the ad company after noticing you bought it, stuffs your feeds with ads for what you just bought so they can bill those ads at the higher conversion rate.

I recently purchased a small apartment. According to calculations, it was cheaper to pay the mortgage than rent a similar size apartment. Now meta thinks I am into collecting apartments in the same postcode. On the other hand, I do find it somewhat useful to see what is happening to the apartment prices around.

You may have heard of the "sales funnel," well, let me introduce you to the "sales loop..."

I’m also amusedly infuriated when “smart” advertising takes the exact wrong pattern …..

“ I see you recently bought a part for a Toyota. You must have a Toyota. Let me sell you the same part for a Volkswagen. “

With some products, that's entirely intentional. The goal is to convince you to keep thinking it was a good idea so you say you like your car in consumer satisfaction surveys that work as better sales drivers since people tend to do a degree of research on them, and to keep people from trying to return the product or make complaints.

But that's typically things like "cars", and they target you very precisely because they know exactly who you are, having just sold you a car.
The humidifier is that they see you bought a "home air treatment device - consumer grade - basic", which puts points in you being in the category of people who want to improve their home air quality. And you know what the most common purchase by that category of people is? Humidifiers!
As big and horrifying as the models are, they can't track everything and rely on putting people into consumer groups, and labeling products by relevance to groups and then tracking them that way.
So even though you're probably in the group because you just bought the thing that most people buy to put them in the group, it's still statistically the thing someone in the group is most likely to buy.

All that to say, it's a fucking sham and you get 95% of the results by matching ads to products instead of people, and it costs a fraction to do it that way.

YouTube fed me a sponsored ad from Scientology today. Like, Google, you know everything about me, you should know this was stupid.

Oh I dunno, maybe stop using Amazon.

I see you’ve just bought a HDMI cable, but what about second HDMI cable?

We think you’ll love it

I was a part of Amazon vine for a while. It's Amazon's program where they offer you shit for free that other companies want to give away in order to get reviews rolling in for new products.

Amazon offers around two to eight "just for you" items most days from these people, based on your order history and ad info crap they have on you.

Well I made the mistake of getting a black toner cartridge for my laser printer through vine once. That will last me like a decade.

Apparently, Amazon now thinks that I own 5000 printers of all different kinds and I'm never good on ink. Most days I would have at least 5 of my recommendations be printer ink or toner. Every single damned day it wanted me to get more ink. For months and months and months.