Those Gosh Darn Advertisements

Did you know that every website you have ever visited collects some form of information on you?Whether it be location, time of day, the device you are using, etc; This data is typically used to be sold to advertisers and used to target advertisements at you in an effort to get you to buy something or to attract you to a service.

For me, most of the websites I visit are websites related to technology or gaming. So the majority of advertisements I get tend to lean towards those topics because of what I type into my browsers search bar and the contents of the websites I visit. This lines up pretty well with who I am because I do avidly play video games and I am very big into technology.

There are two types of Identity when it comes to advertisers, Real Identity and Advertising Identity. First is Real Identity. Your Real Identity is your actual interests in products and services that you were not targeted by an advertisement for. Things like offline hobbies and your job fall into this category. Then there is Advertising Identity. An Advertising Identity is what advertisers believe you are interested in and will push ads towards those products and services. According to the website adroll.com “Targeted advertisements rely on data already collected about customers, using demographics, interest, and behavior trends to approach consumers the way they prefer to be engaged. Leveraging customer data takes the guesswork out of customer acquisition and reduces spending on users who are unlikely to convert.”Lau, Wilson. “What Is Targeted Advertising?” AdRoll, 2023.

My advertising identity most of the time gives me ads about the latest video games and computer hardware. This matches up well with my Real Identity as I have a huge interest in these things and most of the time will click on said ads to check them out. Advertisers also use your social media activity to gather data and give you advertisements.Anything you post onto your Instagram or Facebook, Twitter can be used to target ads to you. Even on the same website you are using for social media will have ads. Some of the advertisements I get are creepily accurate. There have been times that i’m talking about something to a friend in real life then go on the internet and there’s an advertisement for what I was talking about. You would think that would be an invasion of privacy, however, when you use a browser or any device in general. You agree to their terms and conditions. This can include use of your microphone to give you target advertisements which is really creepy.

In conclusion, anything you do on the internet is tracked and data is collected to give you advertisements. Social media posts, Google searches, everything! Make sure to differentiate your Real Identity from your Advertiser Identity and draw the line when you begin to see ads relating to your offline activities.

“1960s Advertising – Magazine Ad – Volkswagen 2 (USA)” by ChowKaiDeng is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.