Thank goodness for bad advertisements online!

[Underseer]

There are serious concerns about governments invading the privacy of citizens, and we should all be worried about that, but private companies are probably doing a lot worse. Heck, Google's whole business model is giving us free stuff, which allows them to collect information about us, which they sell to marketers.

You get free GPS navigation so that Acme Inc can target their online ads more accurately.

For the longest time, YouTube kept showing me advertisements in Spanish. I don't speak Spanish. When this happens, I try not to disabuse anyone of the fact that the ad targeted at me is targeted very poorly. I like it when those companies have the wrong is about me and who I am.

Lately, Facebook has been showing me a lot of ads related to martial arts schools.

The thing that prompted me to write this post was an advertisement on Facebook intended for people who own martial arts schools.

This is insane. I haven't practiced judo since I was eight. I never made it past dark green belt, and frankly I didn't deserve that.

All of which makes me grin, of course. Like I said, it makes me happy to know that somewhere out there are marketers with entirely wrong information about me in their grubby little databases.

So share your stories. What do you think about the issue of private corporations collecting so much information about us? What are some funny, poorly targeted ads that were shown to you?

 

[DrJim]

I always get a kick of seeing ads on FB for stuff that I just ordered online. Sorry, dudes, you lost your chance!

 

[Underseer]

Those are hilarious.

You just know there is probably some incredibly stupid algorithm out there trying to select ads based on what you just bought without being smart enough to exclude the thing you just bought.

 

[barbos]

Some Chicago suburbs are pretty mexicans. I have listened to announcement in spanish in Chicago suburbs Walmart once, no English version, just Spanish. In any case, there was this recent youtube language"fuckup" and I understand it was related to a major youtube blogging advertisement shakeup where google changed the rules. That's why people in Russia were learning turkish language by watching turkish airlines comercials.

 

[barbos]

I always get a kick of seeing ads on FB for stuff that I just ordered online. Sorry, dudes, you lost your chance!

That's because shop you ordered that from did not tell google you actually bought it. Probably due to some privacy laws or something.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Those are hilarious.

You just know there is probably some incredibly stupid algorithm out there trying to select ads based on what you just bought without being smart enough to exclude the thing you just bought.

No, they're showing ads based on what you looked at. They don't know you bought elsewhere, or even sometimes there but a different product.

I get some pretty hilarious ones at times off www.gameknot.com. There seem to be two obsessions the ad engine there has--dating & mail order brides, and birthing centers. I can see the former as targeting chess players in general but I can't imagine what's with the birthing centers.

The one that takes the cake, though, was many years ago when the systems weren't as sophisticated. An eBay ad for technitium-99M. Idiots, just because it's a noun doesn't mean you sell it. (For those of you not familiar with it, it's an isotope frequently used in medical imaging--and it has a 6 hour half life. There's zero trade in it, it's always produced on site.)

 

[barbos]

The one that takes the cake, though, was many years ago when the systems weren't as sophisticated. An eBay ad for technitium-99M. Idiots, just because it's a noun doesn't mean you sell it. (For those of you not familiar with it, it's an isotope frequently used in medical imaging--and it has a 6 hour half life. There's zero trade in it, it's always produced on site.)

Well, there are services which provide medical centers with technitium-99M, and they feel they should advertise their services.

 

[braces_for_impact]

Some Chicago suburbs are pretty mexicans. I have listened to announcement in spanish in Chicago suburbs Walmart once, no English version, just Spanish. In any case, there was this recent youtube language"fuckup" and I understand it was related to a major youtube blogging advertisement shakeup where google changed the rules. That's why people in Russia were learning turkish language by watching turkish airlines comercials.

Dude, go sleep it off.

 

[bilby]

This just came up on my FB feed; It's the first time I have ever heard of Kondo Camping, and given the content of the ad, it seems a bit pointless for me to 'Like' the page...

 

[Underseer]

This just came up on my FB feed; It's the first time I have ever heard of Kondo Camping, and given the content of the ad, it seems a bit pointless for me to 'Like' the page...

View attachment 12860

Sounds like he's fishing for likes to increase his exposure for some unplanned future venture.

 

[bilby]

This just came up on my FB feed; It's the first time I have ever heard of Kondo Camping, and given the content of the ad, it seems a bit pointless for me to 'Like' the page...

Sounds like he's fishing for likes to increase his exposure for some unplanned future venture.

Perhaps; But as Facebook appears to be unaware that I would only consider sleeping in a tent as the result of a natural disaster that demolished all the houses and hotels within driving distance, showing me sponsored content from a camping page that's about to shut down and which I have never heard of when it was a going concern doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that their 'sponsors' imagine that they are spending good money on.

I don't see advertising on FB apart from these sponsored 'suggested posts', because I employ AdBlockPlus. I despise advertising in all its forms - particularly advertising that (like this example) tries to pretend not to be advertising.

“Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news,” is the sentiment expressed in a little framed placard on the desk of L. E. Edwardson, day city editor of the Chicago Herald and Examiner.

- The Fourth Estate: A Newspaper for the Makers of Newspapers, New York, 1918

This sentiment would, if applied to the major Australian 'news' organizations, lead to dramatically truncated bulletins on TV, online, and in what remains of the print media.

About half of the Channel Nine News at 6pm on weeknights (the most watched TV news in Australia) is blatant crypto-advertising (interspersed with Commercial Breaks, in which explicit advertising takes place). Actual news is almost entirely absent.

 

[Underseer]

Sounds like he's fishing for likes to increase his exposure for some unplanned future venture.

Perhaps; But as Facebook appears to be unaware that I would only consider sleeping in a tent as the result of a natural disaster that demolished all the houses and hotels within driving distance, showing me sponsored content from a camping page that's about to shut down and which I have never heard of when it was a going concern doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that their 'sponsors' imagine that they are spending good money on.

I don't see advertising on FB apart from these sponsored 'suggested posts', because I employ AdBlockPlus. I despise advertising in all its forms - particularly advertising that (like this example) tries to pretend not to be advertising.

“Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news,” is the sentiment expressed in a little framed placard on the desk of L. E. Edwardson, day city editor of the Chicago Herald and Examiner.

- The Fourth Estate: A Newspaper for the Makers of Newspapers, New York, 1918

This sentiment would, if applied to the major Australian 'news' organizations, lead to dramatically truncated bulletins on TV, online, and in what remains of the print media.

About half of the Channel Nine News at 6pm on weeknights (the most watched TV news in Australia) is blatant crypto-advertising (interspersed with Commercial Breaks, in which explicit advertising takes place). Actual news is almost entirely absent.

OK, gotcha. Maybe the guy who bought the ads did a bad job of selecting targets? He doesn't quite seem to understand what he's doing.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

I always get ads for Asian porn sites just because I watch a lot of Asian porn. I really don't know how the marketers' algorithms got from A to B there.

 

[Malintent]

Those are hilarious.

You just know there is probably some incredibly stupid algorithm out there trying to select ads based on what you just bought without being smart enough to exclude the thing you just bought.

Hotels.com is the most ridiculous I have seen. Every time I book a hotel in some city, it emails me like a month later on deals to travel to the place I already am booked to travel to.

I enjoy filling marketing databases with false information. It all started when I was a lad buying batteries from Radio Shack. The only way to get my batteries was to give them a ton of information about me. I bet Anna Lee Cage at 212-867-5309 has been getting a lot of junk mail over the past decades. And god help anyone that actually has the email address gofuckyourself@yourass.cum

Public service announcement:

Never use a real email address with any service you don't actually want emailing you (after signup, I mean).
Sure, many sites will send a test email to see if you receive a code to continue registering or whatever... Here is how to bypass that forever:

There is a service called Mailinator.com. Whenever mailinator.com receives any piece of email, it blindly accepts it (regardless if the address exists or not). Try it... send a test message to some ridiculous address like thisaddresscantpossiblyexist@mailinator.com

go to mailinator.com, and enter the address you just made up. Presto! Your inbox appears (to anyone that knows the address to type in). Mailinator dynamically creates any mailbox for which an email is sent to them and offers it up for free to anyone that asks for it, and then automatically deletes any email it gets after a few days.

This is great for entering bogus addresses that you may need to use one time to get a registration code or something.

 

[Elixir]

Those are hilarious.

You just know there is probably some incredibly stupid algorithm out there trying to select ads based on what you just bought without being smart enough to exclude the thing you just bought.

Hotels.com is the most ridiculous I have seen. Every time I book a hotel in some city, it emails me like a month later on deals to travel to the place I already am booked to travel to.

I enjoy filling marketing databases with false information. It all started when I was a lad buying batteries from Radio Shack. The only way to get my batteries was to give them a ton of information about me. I bet Anna Lee Cage at 212-867-5309 has been getting a lot of junk mail over the past decades. And god help anyone that actually has the email address gofuckyourself@yourass.cum

Public service announcement:

Never use a real email address with any service you don't actually want emailing you (after signup, I mean).
Sure, many sites will send a test email to see if you receive a code to continue registering or whatever... Here is how to bypass that forever:

There is a service called Mailinator.com. Whenever mailinator.com receives any piece of email, it blindly accepts it (regardless if the address exists or not). Try it... send a test message to some ridiculous address like thisaddresscantpossiblyexist@mailinator.com

go to mailinator.com, and enter the address you just made up. Presto! Your inbox appears (to anyone that knows the address to type in). Mailinator dynamically creates any mailbox for which an email is sent to them and offers it up for free to anyone that asks for it, and then automatically deletes any email it gets after a few days.

This is great for entering bogus addresses that you may need to use one time to get a registration code or something.

You just became my hero.

 

[Underseer]

Those are hilarious.

You just know there is probably some incredibly stupid algorithm out there trying to select ads based on what you just bought without being smart enough to exclude the thing you just bought.

Hotels.com is the most ridiculous I have seen. Every time I book a hotel in some city, it emails me like a month later on deals to travel to the place I already am booked to travel to.

I enjoy filling marketing databases with false information. It all started when I was a lad buying batteries from Radio Shack. The only way to get my batteries was to give them a ton of information about me. I bet Anna Lee Cage at 212-867-5309 has been getting a lot of junk mail over the past decades. And god help anyone that actually has the email address gofuckyourself@yourass.cum

Public service announcement:

Never use a real email address with any service you don't actually want emailing you (after signup, I mean).
Sure, many sites will send a test email to see if you receive a code to continue registering or whatever... Here is how to bypass that forever:

There is a service called Mailinator.com. Whenever mailinator.com receives any piece of email, it blindly accepts it (regardless if the address exists or not). Try it... send a test message to some ridiculous address like thisaddresscantpossiblyexist@mailinator.com

go to mailinator.com, and enter the address you just made up. Presto! Your inbox appears (to anyone that knows the address to type in). Mailinator dynamically creates any mailbox for which an email is sent to them and offers it up for free to anyone that asks for it, and then automatically deletes any email it gets after a few days.

This is great for entering bogus addresses that you may need to use one time to get a registration code or something.

What happens if someone gives Mailinator an actual, existing email address? Would it intercept that person's emails? Could this be used to snoop someone else's emails?

 

[KeepTalking]

Hotels.com is the most ridiculous I have seen. Every time I book a hotel in some city, it emails me like a month later on deals to travel to the place I already am booked to travel to.

I enjoy filling marketing databases with false information. It all started when I was a lad buying batteries from Radio Shack. The only way to get my batteries was to give them a ton of information about me. I bet Anna Lee Cage at 212-867-5309 has been getting a lot of junk mail over the past decades. And god help anyone that actually has the email address gofuckyourself@yourass.cum

Public service announcement:

Never use a real email address with any service you don't actually want emailing you (after signup, I mean).
Sure, many sites will send a test email to see if you receive a code to continue registering or whatever... Here is how to bypass that forever:

There is a service called Mailinator.com. Whenever mailinator.com receives any piece of email, it blindly accepts it (regardless if the address exists or not). Try it... send a test message to some ridiculous address like thisaddresscantpossiblyexist@mailinator.com

go to mailinator.com, and enter the address you just made up. Presto! Your inbox appears (to anyone that knows the address to type in). Mailinator dynamically creates any mailbox for which an email is sent to them and offers it up for free to anyone that asks for it, and then automatically deletes any email it gets after a few days.

This is great for entering bogus addresses that you may need to use one time to get a registration code or something.

What happens if someone gives Mailinator an actual, existing email address? Would it intercept that person's emails? Could this be used to snoop someone else's emails?

Given that the email server is @mailinator.com, I don't think that would be a problem.

 

[bigfield]

Email spam is a bit of an arms race: some websites have already blacklisted mailinator.com, guerillamail.com, sharklasers.com and any other known disposable mail providers.

 

[Underseer]

What happens if someone gives Mailinator an actual, existing email address? Would it intercept that person's emails? Could this be used to snoop someone else's emails?

Given that the email server is @mailinator.com, I don't think that would be a problem.

Ah, OK. Thanks for clearing that up.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The one that takes the cake, though, was many years ago when the systems weren't as sophisticated. An eBay ad for technitium-99M. Idiots, just because it's a noun doesn't mean you sell it. (For those of you not familiar with it, it's an isotope frequently used in medical imaging--and it has a 6 hour half life. There's zero trade in it, it's always produced on site.)

Well, there are services which provide medical centers with technitium-99M, and they feel they should advertise their services.

Did you not note my saying it's produced on site?

Medical centers do not buy technitium-99. Rather, they buy molybdenum-99 and extract the technitium-99 they need from it. Even those cows aren't long-lived as molybdenum-99 only has 66-hour half life, but that's still much, much better than the technitium-99.