Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Ad Fails

An advertisement for a Porsche plug-in hybrid really fails. First, Porsche was old and lame by high school. Lotus, Lamborghini, Ferrari, and so many other car companies come ahead. Second, I do not have a job where an ostentatious car helps me. Third, I cannot keep my mobile phone properly charged. A plug-in hybrid is not the car for me.

Given how much activity I have online and all the tracking data collected about that activity, I feel that advertisements delivered to me ought to be fantastic. There should only be advertisements delivered on the pages I visit that confirm my desires or make me suddenly desire it.

Certainly looking up this car put plenty of data out there supporting the advertiser’s algorithms pushing this ad at me. Probably I will see more of it. Perhaps it is better, though, than the ads of the last item I checked out on Amazon. Reminding me that I did not buy it probably will not trick me into actually buying it.

UPDATE: Perhaps the ad had more to do with the page I visited than data about me? It was a piece critical of the Chegg IPO by comparing it Twitter as a success. I visited it because I heard a stock doubling after the IPO like Twitter’s did should be considered a failure. (The gains go to investors not Twitter, so Twitter should have set a higher price since other valued it more.)

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