Sometimes I have no idea why I see the ads I do
I know that there are lots of you out there who worry about the trails you’re leaving all over the internet, and are concerned that, thanks to Big Data and The Cloud and the NSA, pretty soon advertisers will be beaming perfectly targeted predictive ads straight into your head and you’ll become a consumer culture zombie, mindlessly buying things you never needed and definitely didn’t want.
I myself, however, do not fear such an eventuality. And here’s why:
This is an ad that I have now been served 3 times in the past 24 hours when I went to watch a video on YouTube.
Digital video advertising is the Big New Growth Thing in online advertising. One of the more recent related trend subsets on YouTube has been for content providers to run their own videos as ads. It’s a good strategy, because if you’re not paying close attention, you can be fooled into thinking that the ‘ad’ is actually part of the video you’re trying to access. It seems to work particularly well for musical artists, because listening to 30-60 seconds of a song (before you realize it’s an ad and click the ‘skip ad’ button) can actually give you an opportunity to like a song you probably wouldn’t otherwise have heard.
But this Xiaochu video isn’t undiscovered music – it’s a weird mashup which seems to reference K-pop, Pikachu and even that old strange favourite, Magibon. I found it incomprehensible (and I probably know more about K-pop fandom and Magibon than you do), and not just because of the language barrier.
I expected the comments section to be filled with ‘WTF?s’, but no – it’s got plenty of likes and lots of positive comments. So it’s hitting the mark with some kind of target audience. The thing is, I’m so far outside the target audience, I’m practically in another solar system – so why did YouTube serve me the ad?
Well, it could be because I have a strange YouTube viewing history; it could be because Google thinks I’m a 24-year-old shopaholic who lives in Ottawa (that’s what they came back with when I checked my Google stats a couple of years ago); it could be that whoever wrote the ad tech algorithms that apply to this particular situation had a hangover that day.
But the bottom line is this: As long as I’m getting served ads like this on a regular basis, I know that Big Data really has no clue who I am or what I’m interested in. And until they do, I’m not panicking about whether advertisers (or the government) knows too much about me.