Retargeting Ads Stalk You For Weeks After You Shop

eldavojohn writes "The New York Times is reporting on a new kind of web ad that takes products you were looking at purchasing on one site and continually advertising them in front of you at subsequent sites. After looking at shoes at Zappos, a mother in Montreal noticed the shoes followed her: 'For days or weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes. It is a pretty clever marketing tool. But it's a little creepy, especially if you don't know what's going on.' The spreading ploy is called 'retargeting ads' and really are just a good demonstration of how an old technology (all they use are leftover browser cookies) are truly invasive and privacy violating. Opponents are clamoring for government regulation to protect the consumer and one writer mentioned a consumer 'do not track' list — adding that retailers really show little fear of turning off customers with their invasion."

Comments

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[sammy baby]

For certain items and types of purchases, it makes sense. Maybe I'm looking at purchasing a new TV, then decide to hold off for a bit. But because I happened to browse for one on Overstock.com, I might keep seeing ads for it everyplace that Overstock runs ads. In this case, it makes sense: I was about to make something of an impulse buy, and after seeing the ad repeatedly, I may be induced to do go through with it later.

But in other cases, it's annoying as hell and makes no sense at all. I'm in the middle of renovating my house, and was recently looking at ceiling fans and vessel sinks online. Now I can't click on a site without seeing ads for sinks and fans, despite the fact that I made my selection and purchased them weeks ago.

FireFox extenstion Ghostery addresses this

[capedgirardeau]

I have found using Ghostery added on to FireFox has cut down on a lot of this sort of cross site tracking for me.

http://www.ghostery.com/

Re:Anti-advertising...

[dyingtolive]

Frankly, advertisers don't care. They've gotten reaction out of you such that you remember the names of those companies, and will for the rest of your life. It doesn't matter if you're swearing off their products, so long as you can't forget their brand. This is the ape-shit bananas mentality that goes into advertisement. That's why you don't see effective advertising, but just "fire and forget" advertising that focuses on getting the name out there as much as possible.

Source: Marketing Ex-girlfriend.