When I noticed an online ad promising "The Secrets to Long, Lush Asian Hair" recently, I rolled my eyes. I already have the secret to Asian hair: be Asian. This ad, however, would not be avoided. I saw it on every site I visited, on Facebook, news sites, Google. It began to wear me down, so I clicked on it, briefly perusing its vague claims. Later, I was casually chatting about it with a colleague, laughing about the content. "You haven't seen it? This ad is everywhere," I said. "Maybe the ad is following you," he replied. "No, no," I said. "It's on different, unrelated sites I visit ..." Pause. "Following me?"
I was mortified that I hadn't figured it out. Of course ads are following me. They're following you, too. I've long known that Google scans my Gmail inbox, tempting me with Google ads that match my interests, which I conveniently revealed in my e-mail. I foolishly thought, however, that display ads, the little picture boxes along the margins, were stationary, like a glossy page in a magazine. Then I bought a backpack online and found myself being accosted for days by scores of online backpack peddlers, as if I were going to outfit an entire army. This creepy tactic of tailoring ads to consumers based on their Internet habits has a name: retargeting or remarketing. To better understand it, I called Simon Smith, chief strategist at Commune Media in Toronto.
The easiest to understand, he says, are ads tailored to our professed interests - what we list, for example, as our interests on Facebook. Then there are our Google searches, tracked by cookies. "If my interest is Harry Potter fan fiction and I don't want people to know," Smith says, "I won't put it on Facebook. But ... if I'm searching for Harry Potter fan fiction through Google, Google knows it and will serve up ads based on that." And then there's Google AdWords, Google's advertising offshoot, which creates advertising packages for online media. One of their tactics is to sell "demographics," which is how I came to be stalked, I think, by the purveyors of Asian hair secrets. A young urban woman who trolls shopping and fashion sites, I also visit several Asian pop-culture blogs and periodically punch in Google search terms like "Korean perm," which I did recently to research the toxicity of the solutions with which I've often treated my hair to make it wavier. The irony is that the ad touting the secrets of Asian hair may have latched on to me while I was seeking ways to alter my natural locks. In any case, the whole concept of retargeting seems flawed to me. I am being tracked, but the tracking is always one step behind me. I already have Asian hair. I already have a backpack. These ads are always popping in late to the party.
"Maybe the inference was wrong," Smith admits about my case. "But the whole point of this stuff is to quickly learn if we're targeting the wrong people. If you're not clicking the ad, the system learns and keeps tweaking to make it work better." You heard it here, folks: As a phenomenon, retargeting is out of its infancy and akin to a wobbly toddler, but it's growing smarter and bigger and faster every day. Whether this is a positive thing or a negative one is a matter of perspective. For some, the tactic is an efficient way to get product information, while others regard it as a growing invasion of personal privacy powered by ad dollars. Perhaps what's scariest is that it can be both.