So i was walking with co-workers for coffee and somehow we talked about a college. Now i can assure you that i have never ever searched for that college and i didn't even know it existed before that conversation took place. And 30 mins later, i'm browsing instagram at work and there is an ad of the said college. If this isn't creepy af, i dunno what is.
These kind of events happen by chance and have been happening well before almost everyone started carrying mobile recording devices in their pockets and even pre-internet.
I have no doubt that advertisers would love to have that kind of insight but I can't help but feel that the anecdote of the form, we talked about A and A showed up X minutes later, is too easily explain by coincidence. How many topics were discussed, how many ads were shown? When I read something like this I imagine the anecdote should read more along the lines of how we talked about A, B, C, D, E and F and among the dozen or so ads I saw afterwords one of them was topic A! Can you believe it? And yes, yes I can, that is a pretty neat coincidence.
On the other hand if out of all 6 of the topics discussed all of the ads that were shown afterward were related to them, maybe not all, but more than one or two. That sounds like there is something fishy going on.
I don't mean to single out this particular example, it was to be a simple comment that had more to say. So, thank you for the inspiration!
The most blatant I've experienced was on the Wii U. The controller with the screen powers up and shows ads for new games every now and then. We actually had a bit of fun with it, casually talking about new games and guess what happened. An ad for that particular game was shown. I'm 100% certain now, that it happens with smartphones as well.
I thought that was some great scheme made by the adults.
Turns out, it isn't. Just everyday life coincidences. Reinforced by the global rythm of social life.
College ads are more likely to appear in the periods when people talk about college.
But to really answer this question, we could build a better experiment. Write out a set of topics on index cards. You have to be careful that topics aren't new product rollouts (otherwise you really have to think about how you decided to write that topic down in the first place). Draw a card, don't talk about or search the topic for some amount of time, then inject the topic where it might be observed (talk about it and/or search for it somewhere), then for some amount of time, see if it comes up.
And have a control group that you simply don't bring up at all. Make sure to have more than one, so that you still have more remaining if someone around you brings up one of your control topics.
"We were talking about new games and I got and ad for a new game!" sounds like pretty standard, non-targeted advertising. Easily chalked up to coincidence. Steam advertises new games to me, some I'm interested in and some I'm not, but I don't think Steam is reading my brainwaves.
How many Wii U games are there anyway?
Would you expect the Wii U to do some sort of correlation (other people that own the same games A & B also own C, so you're probably interested in C)?
Also, let's say what you are saying is true. How come ad decides to show up 30mins - 60 mins after conversation takes place?
* the "somehow we talked about a college" is because someone else at coffee was looking at something college related and it was recently on their mind so they brought it up. You're associated with those people, so ad agency it decides to show you an ad. It may do this a lot, but the times it actually works really stick out to you.
* After the coffee, one or more people search or perform actions associated with that college. Ad agency knows you were recently meeting with them so decides to show you some associated ad.
Keep in mind that the ad agencies, whether Facebook or Google or some lesser known but still large one, have their own profiles of you and who you associate with.
I think Occam's razor holds that since we know there are multiple agencies tracking what you do and who you do it with online and that can conceivably be used to explain most of this, it's a much more likely explanation than a large company outright lying in a way that would have a horrendous backlash if proven (and it's not really that hard to prove if people got serious).
Edit: whoops, not that hard to prove...