This is what I love about "targeted advertising"

[thewayne]

The fact about it's anything but.

This morning I received an ad for "The surprisingly low cost for cremation in Cloudcroft!"

The surprise is that the cost would be either zero or infinite as there are no crematoriums or mortuaries in Cloudcroft. I also love the ads for "Fantastic senior retirement homes in Cloudcroft!" as there aren't any of those up here CLOUDCROFT IS A VILLAGE OF EIGHT HUNDRED PEOPLE! We don't even have a traffic light! We do have a school zone, though. And one gas station/mini-mart, 24-hour.

Now, these ads are based on geolocation information coded into routers in my area, the ad servers are completely dumb appliances. They don't know better. But it is kinda funny.

But the one that inspired this post was from a header ad that Yahoo Mail, owned by Verizon, decided would be appropriate for me.

From Amazon.

All is said was "Birdhouse skateboards jaws lava deck 8.25 inches." All lower case.

Obviously I'm not going to click on any ad, it's much more fun to make ridiculous inferences that will probably be wildly inaccurate!

So what have we got?

A manufacturer of skateboards named Birdhouse? Passes the reasonableness test. Could well be.

As I recall, a 'deck' is also a synonym for the board upon which skateboarders skate.

So does Birdhouse make a line of boards called Jaws Lava that are either 8.25" wide or long? Either dimension seems kinda ridiculous, but a board 8.25" long would make an awesome video! Though I wouldn't want to be the paramedics on standby.

Comments

[elayna]

I'm always amused when I buy something from Amazon and they decide I want to buy another one. A few things, sure. If I bought a shirt from a particular company, maybe I'd like more shirts of that style. But a webcam? No, only got one computer without one, only need one. They need a human to check whether it's something that people would reasonably need multiples of.

[thewayne]

I know!

I bought a pair of shoes from Duluth Trading, and all of a sudden I’m seeing tons of ads for that particular shoe! PEOPLE, GET A CLUE! I am not going to buy the same shoes that I just bought! Maybe in a couple of years, but not now!

[kathmandu]

I used to work in a real-estate office. Sometimes we'd try to look up architectural terms, to make sure we accurately described a house.

Search even once for "vaulted and cathedral ceilings" and suddenly get ads for "Buy vaulted and cathedral ceilings on Amazon!" "Get vaulted and cathedral ceilings on eBay"

Really? How are you going to deliver them?

[thewayne]

That got an immediate actual LOL out of me!  Yeah, delivery must be a bitch! Terry Jones complaining: "Yeah, I ordered my buttressed arch in the 15th century, bastards still haven't delivered!  I think it got misdelivered to Carthage.  Bloody Romans!"

[richardf8]

A quick google shows your inference to be correct and the campaign must have been effective because they’re all sold out.

[thewayne]

But you know?  Advertising skateboards to a dude who's pushing 60?!  Aside from Tony Hawk who is 52, there's probably not many people almost 59 doing skateboard tricks. :-)

Now, granted, maybe I have grandchildren, though I don't.  I searched through my email for the word skateboard, and I found precisely ONE where I used the word in the body of a message that I originated, not an attachment, but the actual text, and that message was in 2016.  There were other occurrences in attachments or replying to other people's emails that had the word, but I'm not sure if that counts for keyword searches.  Regardless, the number was low and rather old.

Silly advertisers.  But if they want to waste money pushing ads in my face that I'll never respond to, that's their dime wasted.  Glad to know they were effective at getting attention from somebody.

[silveradept]

It's always amusing to see how bad advertising is at trying to convince me to purchase something. I think it would be even nicer if our ad-blockers essentially flooded the servers in reply with nonsense data to try and make them figure out why so many hundreds of people are interested in gold-plated toilets.

[thewayne]

You wonder if, in such an instance, the head honchos are going 'Woot!' and the web analysts are going 'Wait a minute here....' and the head honchos are going 'but Woot! and we pay your salary!' and the analysts finally say 'Okay.  Woot.' and orders for gold-plated toilets are placed in anticipation for sales. One could hope.