For years, digital marketing has led to stuff you’ve searched for and looked at following you around online. Cookies are as old as the internet and are the simple most valuable resource in internet history. These days, you can often click on a box at the top of the ads and it’ll tell you why you’re seeing the ad you’re seeing. If it’s stuff you looked at it’s likely going to tell you that it’s a website, you visited and items you looked at on the site. Annoying and a bit intrusive, yes, but understandable. What’s becoming a dramatically increasing crud with internet advertising is highly salacious material that’s targeting people based on the lowest common denominator of internet profiling. What am I talking about specifically?
Have you noticed a significant increase in the amount of advertising with bikini’s or less involved? Have your noticed subjective messaging attached to it? That’s what I’m talking about. It’s become so pervasive using Google that my wife recently saw ads on web pages on my computer and asked if I’d been going at porn sites or something. When I clicked on the box and asked why I was seeing those ads it stated, it always considers age and gender.
I don’t doubt that porn and porn like advertising is popular with many 39-year-old guys, I see web stats and know as much, but it also demonstrates something remarkably hypocritical. Google’s quick to jump to political correctness and left-wing politics but they sure are quick to use the most basic profile available to push lewd advertising one’s way. As I was working on the show, I came across an ad that frustrated me the most yet. Front and center on a news website I was presented with an ad for Ashley Madison. The ad was a bikini-clad woman with the verbiage find a hotter woman. When I clicked on the box, sure enough, the reason was age and gender.
In a nutshell, it repulses me. Objectified women (no girl grows up hope be take off clothes for a living, offensive message, company that stands for values I reject. Not to mention my wife is hotter anyway. But that’s Google in all its hypocrisy. If you’ve come across similar material and didn’t know why you’re getting it, now you do.
Photo by: MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP/Getty Images