“What would it mean for your business if you could target potential clients who are actively discussing their need for your services in their day-to-day conversations? No, it's not a Black Mirror episode—it's Voice Data, and CMG has the capabilities to use it to your business advantage.”
There’s also a totally plausible and far more insidious answer to what’s going on with the experiences people have of the ads matching their conversations.
That explanation is advertising works. And worse, it works subconsciously. That you’re seeing the ads and don’t even notice you’re seeing them and then they’re worming their way into your conversations at which point you become more aware of them and then start noticing the ads.
Which does comport with the billions of dollars spent on advertising every year. It would be very weird if an entire ad industry that’s at least a century old was all a complete nonsense waste of money this whole time.
To me, this whole narrative is just another parable about why we need to do everything possible to limit our own exposure to ads to avoid being manipulated.
Damn, I hadn’t thought of that. The chicken egg question of spooky ad relevance. Insidious indeed.
I feel like the idea of some person or group having enough info to psychologically manipulate or predict should be way scarier than the black helicopter stuff, especially given that it’s one of the few conspiracy theories we actually have a bunch of high quality evidence for, like marketing textbooks and statistics.
But here we are. Government surveillance is the hot button, not the fact that marketers would happily sock puppet you given the chance.