What is the most memorable/strange targeted AD you've gotten online?
Recently I keep seeing suggested/ads for things making fun of electric vehicles.
My favorite car I ever owned was a nissan leaf, and right now I have an electric scooter, so not sure what I did to get on list of “people who hate electric vehicles” and why that’s even a list.
American football fans probably remember the crazy wildcard playoff game between the Colts and Chiefs during the 2013 season’s playoffs. The Chiefs built up a big lead, but Andrew Luck led the Colts to an insane comeback victory.
I am a Chiefs fan. At the time, the Chiefs had not won a playoff game since 1993. After a devastating 2012 season, the team cleaned house and brought in a new regime, led by Andy Reid. It worked well and the Chiefs had one of the biggest record improvements year-to-year in NFL history. My optimism was at an all time high. This was the year the playoff curse would end.
I spent the week leading up to the game just absorbed in the hype, reading, listening, and watching every bit of analysis I could find.
When the game finally ended, I was absolutely devastated. It’s probably the hardest I’ve ever taken a loss as a fan.
…and then, I started getting targeted ads for Colts merch, including a cardboard Andrew Luck mask (which was just a cutout of his face with the eyes cut out stuck to a popsicle stick.) Everywhere I went on the internet, I was haunted by a grinning, eyeless, Andrew Luck reminding me that the Chiefs would never win a playoff game. This went on for several weeks.
I was snowmobiling with my brother in an area with no cell service. We stopped for a break and I mentioned that the headlights kind of looked like Blinky the 3 eyed fish from the Simpsons. I have never said that out loud before or after, and I haven’t even watched the Simpsons in years. The next day I get an ad on Instagram for a sticker of Blinky the 3 eyed fish. Thats so specific it could not have been a coincidence. My phone must have heard me say that that one time, REMEMBERED it until I get back into an area with cell service, and then phoned home to tell whatever corpo that I might be interested in Blinky. Wild stuff.
I was bra shopping and clicked on one that was also a breast pump. Started getting ads for baby stuff for a couple months. I also listen to Spotify at work, there are currently a bunch of Hispanic construction workers working on the building. Since then about a third of my Spotify ads are in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish.
Last one I remember was in like 2012. I was searching around for a wireless HDMI system and actually found and purchased it. For WEEKS post purchase this thing kept showing up in my adds. Everyone has case after case of these fuckers reading their mind and my only story is one that was so fucked it was funny. They were always overselling their capabilities I think.
Helped my parents get treatment for $old_people_health_complications. I used my phone for contact. I had barely started using that number in particular.
Next week I received a call asking if I wanted to “reserve a place in the town cemetery in case of the unfortunate” (it wasn’t in the US, words might be different).
It wasn’t me, it was my parents, and the fuckers tried to manipulate potentially grieving people.
For duvets, the day after I bought a duvet, from the retailer that sold me the duvet. You have all the data in the world, steal all my data to target me personally, and that is the best you can come up with?
For [acronym] the day after I was emailing someone about a completely different thing that used the same acronym. That one was more creepy than strange, tbf.
Oh my algorithm is FUCKED because I’m so insanely curious.
So first of all I’m always googling stuff from medical procedures to culture and liguistics. That’s part of how I found out that apparently black Americans will sometimes get a nose job to confirm better to western beauty standards.
Second of all, I will click on everything that I can’t identify, which often turn out to be kitchen implements or specialized hobby equipment. One time I clicked on some weird looking shoes, shortly followed by some bizarre looking amorphous plastic things which turned out to be special climbing shoes and screw-in footholds, respectively.
So anyway, that’s the story of how Google adsense thinks I’m an African American woman who hates her nose but is also extremely passionate about indoor climbing (none of this is even remotely true).
I block all possible ads so I haven’t been getting any random ones in ages, but my email provider has an ad for “Moorhuhn” on their page that always slips through the filter somehow so whenever I check my emails I’m asked to shoot virtual chickens.
youtube hit me with an ad for a company that makes those little outlet boxes that go in walls. so of course my ass watched the full video, liked it, left a comment, shared the url, the whole nine yards.
Few years ago I got an “ad” that was just some dudes really bad call of duty black ops 2 sniping montage.
I mean full on some of the most meh trickshots and quickscopes I think I’ve ever seen, against the built in AI opponents that you can enable in custom games, something like 5 or so years after the game was actually relevant to pop culture.
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