Personalized ads just for you!

We’ve all seen an ad passing by on our phone about somethings we’ve just talked about. How does that happen? Is it true that your phone is eavesdropping your conversations? I am here today to explain the meaning of personalized ads!

What are ads?

For starters a little recap of what ads are. The purpose of an ad is to put up a temptation for the customer. Therefor the customer will be interested and take action. This usually involves a promotion of commercial products or services. Ads appear in many forms. The most common ones are:

• Promoted posts

This type of ad seems like just a regular post in an Instagram or Facebook feed. This ad pushes itself into the feed of your followers so it won’t vanish in the algorithm. You are basically paying for your post to be seen.

• Carrousel ad

With a carrousel ad, you can show multiple pictures at once. That way you can show off more products at the same time, and the customer can scroll through the pictures.

• Link ad

The purpose of this ad is to convert clicks on the displayed link which will lead to a landingspage or a website. This form is used to generate more traffic.

• Video ad

This ad is a way to advertise your products or services as an eye-catcher. A customer is more likely to remember a video ad and is mostly used for brand awareness, discounts or the launch of a new product.

What is the difference between regular and personalized ads?

Not too long ago, ads were all over the place. You would see non-personalized ads, which aren’t based on a user’s past behavior. There most likely wouldn’t be any interest in the ads because you simply didn’t care. But to make your ads more personalized, you can target your audience. You could target on their location, their age, the kind of YouTube video’s they watch, their interest in music and even the photos they take on their phone. Facebook alone can target on every message you send or receive, the stickers you send, the things you like and share, the apps your account is connected to,… And the most scary one: they have access to your webcam and microphone at any time.

So it’s safe to say ads can be very personalized nowadays!

Myth or fact?

We’ve seen the TikTok’s. Stealing their boyfriends phone to talk about babies, baby diapers, baby clothes, babies, babies, babies,… So the boyfriend would “coincidentally” see all the baby ads and would take it as a sign. Or you just had a conversation about AirPods and soon after, you see an ad about AirPods.

But is it true? Is your phone eavesdropping your conversations?

It probably is. Either it’s all one big coincidence, over and over again, or the equipment (multiple microphones and cameras) of your phone are collecting your voice data and is storing it in a server to use it for marketing purposes. Although it’s perfectly legal and developers are claiming that they are not abusing the information, it’s still pretty creepy.

So now that you know all of this, say hi to the FBI man in your phone once in a while!