What’s even more hilarious is how I get it here. They keep referring to a city 70 miles away. I have family there, but I’m not from there.
Actually, it’s not hilarious, it’s boring. Why not mix it up? “Terre Haute mom lost 57 lbs!!!” “Women in Osaka want to date YOU!!!” “San Bernadino man made 54,000 euros in his spare time!” yada yada.
Let me also register my approval of this point…that’s a thinker.
Facebook kept having ads to do surveys until I turned 40, then stopped cold. Nobody wants my opinion any more. Too old.
I sometimes change my location at Yahoo to my hometown to look at local news. That lasts until the page refreshes, because they revert all Bay Area locations to Sunnyvale, their HQ. I do not care about a city 50 miles away that I’ve probably only been to once, if even.
Am I the only one that gets spam like, “Tucson explosion kills hundreds” or “Tucson Suffers Terrorist Attack”? I’ve never clicked on them, but at first they did get my attention.
I know the ads are supposed to make it a more personalized experience, but IMO it exponentially increases the smarminess of the ad. Are we supposed to believe that MiraclePill recruited a woman *from every town in America *in order to tout their product? Give me a break! And if the company behind the ad is willing to deceive me about where the woman lives, then surely it will deceive me about other things.
And, I hate to say it, but the redhead that supposedly hails from my suburb, who lost 47 pounds of belly fat in one month (!), still looks quite fat to me. Maybe they should invent a pill to get rid of double chins.
What I’d like to know is why the advertiser’s that I’m not interested in are able to find out my location, but every time I go to get the phone number of a local chain store, I have to manually type my ZIP code into the store locator.
Probably because zip codes are pretty tiny - it’d be real easy to identify you as being in the wrong one, in the same city.
Also it’s not always innacurate (as demonstrated above), and because it would make them look intrusive and associate them with smarmy internet ads.
That shit cracks me up. Since I’ve been in India I’ve been getting a lot of stuff promising to help me become fluent in English and how THE WORLD WILL BE MINE once I speak perfect English.
Also, lots of cricket info. More cricket info than anyone would ever humanly need.
Depending on the circumstances, sometimes my browser is proxied through a connection point located about 1,200 miles from my home. Other times, I use a direct connection to the interwebs. Know what’s strange? The same lovely ladies are apparently seeking intimate connections in both locations.
How convenient for me!
It’s based on your IP address, but not very accurately. Basically, they resolve your hostname, which is generated by your ISP, so wherever your ISP’s nearest major switching station is where you’ll appear to be from. xx.xxx.xxx.indianapolis.att.dsl.com or something like that.
Mine is in Southfield, a city I suppose is closeby but I’ve never been to, so when I see these “Southfield sings want to bone you right now,” I think, “But, I don’t care about people in southfield…”
The appeal is probably only for people who don’t even realize it’s location-dynamic, they’re supposed to see it and think it’s a huge coincidence that the ad is specific to the location they happen to be from.
They’re both really bad and kinda amusing here, as it always shows up as “Albany-Schenectady-Troy” whatever. That should be a dead giveaway that it’s location-dynamic since nobody would actually use that construction.
Snorgtees.com…I actually responded to a banner ad (I think here on straightdope) and bought 3 shirts. They were delivered and were of good quality (I bought the t-shirts as kind of a gag gift…but found out they were of decent quality). I’ll probably order from them again.