I recently saw an advertisement for the musical »Aladdin« in Stuttgart on YouTube. You have to endure the annoying advertising clips if you want to watch a video on the platform and have not activated an ad blocker. Nice service, I thought that Youtube would offer me a summary again, because I had already seen the musical two weeks earlier. In view of the high ticket prices, it is rather unlikely that someone would go to a musical twice in such a short time. So the ad was for naught.
Advertisers can target their video ads on YouTube based on user location, age, and interests. Since I did not disable personalized advertising in this case, it is possible that the video platform derived an interest in the musical from my search history or that I watched similar videos to the people who clicked on the ad. That would be smart. But maybe it was also because I was traveling with the same IP address as my wife, who googled the musical and booked the tickets. That would be less intelligent.
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This may seem odd, but misguided advertising can quickly become irreverent. Journalist Gillian Brockell reported in the Washington Post how weeks after her miscarriage she was bombarded with pregnancy ads on social media. “Please, tech companies, I beg of you: if your algorithms are smart enough to determine that I’m pregnant or have given birth, then they can also be smart enough to notice that my baby has died and advertise accordingly – or maybe, just maybe, not to advertise at all,” she wrote bitterly.
Statisticians had carried out complex big data analyzes in which, to put it simply, algorithms sift through huge data sets such as purchase history. They found that women tend to load larger amounts of unscented lotions and dietary supplements into their shopping carts during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy.