And if so, is this helping advertising anticipate our desires? It’s a rhetorical question—of course, it is. Think about it:
You’re with a friend having a coffee and you happen to mention Sitges, a small town near Barcelona. Suddenly, as your phone was in the conversation, everything seems to be about that place.
Eventually, Instagram starts reminding you that you’re thinking about going on vacation, and between the masterclass about why you should blend your proteins and a 2 hours concert divided in 48 stories of 15 second each, suddenly it appears: an ad showing this beautiful house in Sitges that you would never believe it, has a 25% discount.
At the same time, Facebook starts showing you the best flights to Barcelona, with a special offer if you’re taking right after the bus to Sitges.
And so it goes, with everything.
You’re thinking about taking a surf lesson sometime and that’s enough for all your social networks to start convincing you that becoming a surfer is actually what you need and showing you the best places where to start and how to get there.
It’s like having a full-time psychologist that is constantly analyzing us, that wants to know who we are and mostly, what we want.
And it knows.
It knows that back in 2014 we managed to edit our aunt Roberta’s wrinkles out of the wedding pictures and now it encourages us to «learn how to master Adobe Photoshop with xxx”.
It knows that we may want a pair of new shoes or to go to a festival and it starts showing us how great those new Nikes look on the Awakening’s floor.
«It’s a kind of magic» Freddy Mercury would’ve said.
Also a little bit scary, I’d add.
Remember those days in which advertising was the same for all? In which you could’ve just turned off the TV and it would’ve actually stopped?
I used to hate those long commercials that had nothing to do with me but now I kind of miss them. They were honest, they never hid the fact that they were ads.
Now there are so many that it is almost impossible to recognise all of them.
“My favourite influencer just made a video, let’s watc…oh, it’s an ad”
“Look! It’s the Pride Parad…forget it, it’s just an ad”
“Why is there a Calvin Klein model getting our drinks? Ok, sure: the whole bar is an ad”
Do we really need all these ads? Or better, is it really necessary to sell literally anything until the point that we ourselves become the brand?
Don’t answer, our phones are listening to us.
If you want to discover more about this topic, here’s an article that explains it in a more technical way.
