During a comedy podcast I was listening to on Apple Podcast earlier this week, the host and his guest were riffing about Triscuit crackers vs. Wheat Thins. The riff was kind of funny, but not particularly memorable. It was about 5 minutes in an hour long podcast.
Later that evening, I opened up YouTube and the first thing I see is an ad for Triscuit crackers. Was this a coincidence? I think not. I was astonished to see this ad.
I haven’t eaten a triscuit in over 20 years. I haven’t bought or eaten crackers of any kind in at least 5 years. I don’t even walk down the cracker aisle at the grocery store and never search for crackers, let alone Triscuits, online.
Something is tracking me.
This seems off, because I have very strict privacy controls set on my iPhone, within my apps and for YouTube. Because of this, I generally see incessant Progressive Insurance and Liberty Mutual Insurance Ads which I guess are default ads for people who disable the setting for YouTube to “personalize” ads.
I’m going to go down a privacy rathole to figure this one out and prevent it from recurring.
I hate being tracked and served ads – especially surreptitiously.
From a pragmatic point of view, showing me a Triscuit ad is a complete waste of effort. I will never buy this product. If google’s ad tracking was even slightly intelligent, it would realize I only buy and eat meat.
So if I can’t figure it out, at least I can rest comfortable knowing Triscuit is wasting its ad budget and google’s tracking is ineffective in this case.