As the internet advances, everything that comes with it is also improvised. And that includes advertising we all see on the web.
Advertising is seen as something that drives potential customers to become buyers. On the old days, the earlier forms of advertising were targeting generalized audience segments by broad demographic characteristics. To appeal the vast variety of people, ads were made colorful and attractive: memorable and often creative, clever and even emotional.
But as technology comes into play, it revolutionized advertising by replacing humans with computers that use data that links all together into targeted ads.
Google and Facebook are two of the giants that take most of the internet ads' market. Along with their competitors, they are reshaping the industry by creating precise ads, changing how consumers digest ads.
So there was a time when ads are like art. As tech intervenes, ads that had symbiotic reciprocal relationship with the media they are at, are not anymore true.
To revolutionized advertising, both Google and Facebook pair user-generated contents and personal information to show the most compelling advertising to specific user.
Google as the prominent search giant of the web, serves sponsored results alongside other results in response to search queries. The same goes to Google's other products. Google also displays ads on non-Google websites, using programs such as AdSense and DoubleClick.
Facebook is the social media titan that is years younger than Google. It uses information that users have given it, such age, gender, relationship and location, and pair the data to display ads from advertisers that are seeking to target people by specific characteristics.
Although Google and Facebook use similar signal to show the most compelling ads they have on their disposal, the two use a slightly different method. Google that is more known for its Search product, is more into monetizing user activity. On the other hand, Facebook that is the social giant of the web, is monetizing user data.
The two use specific activity (user searching for a term like "vacation") and user data (gender or relationship status) to get to know about the person that provides the data. Both will generalized the information and combine that with their collection leads in order to create personalization.
This personalization, paired with precision, are changing the nature of ads.
Ads are no longer arts; they're no longer about entertaining, delighting or making a personal connection. The most compelling and engaging ads are those that are precisely targeted to certain individuals that happen to "need them".
The good thing about this is that ads shouldn't be annoying anymore. Because they are targeted precisely to certain individuals using personalization, ads that appear should appeal them.
The downside however, is privacy. Both Google and Facebook, as well as other ad-providers that use targeting to show ads, need to gather sufficient user information for their ads to work. One way to create engaging and trustworthy ads is by showing an interest in what people already care about, which is helped by knowing as much about them as possible.
Such strategies pose ethical questions about privacy and personal information as users may have consented to the data use without actually reading or understanding their long and complex terms-of-service documents.
So if you find precisely-targeted ads to be creepy, you can opt-out of their services' targeting method by checking the settings they have provided by default for you. If you wish to browse the web anonymously, you may want to logout from your account first, clear your browsing history and cookies, or use anonymous browser like Tor. It's also advised to not put sensitive data on your profile that you don't to share with anymore..