Well, that did remind me that I had a New Jersey (where they do have Target) ZIP code when I started with Pandora, but have since moved to New York (where we’ve only got KMart). So I updated my account, hoping in vain to start getting the retirement community ads instead.
Nope.
The Target bullseye is still on me.
Uh, that’s not the way Pandora’s AI works. It’s based off the fact that many people who start a Bach station give Pandora a thumb’s up when they play Beethoven, and vice versa.
My Pandora ads seem to be (somewhat) targeted to the demographics that presumably have the tastes represented by my stations. The pop-friendly stations get the Target ads, the indie/singer-songwriter station keeps getting ads for an album by Grace Potter & the Nocturnals, the classics/Motown station gets ads for Buick. My noise-rock, screechy-vocals, chunky dance, and hatred of humanity channels don’t seem to get ads… 
There could be something I misunderstood about the Music Genome Project.
[QUOTE=wikipedia]
A given song is represented by a vector (a list of attributes) containing approximately 400 “genes” (analogous to trait-determining genes for organisms in the field of genetics). Each gene corresponds to a characteristic of the music, for example, gender of lead vocalist, level of distortion on the electric guitar, type of background vocals, etc.
[/QUOTE]
…and thus, a station “evolves” as some genes are selected more often and others are pruned.
But if it really is more similar to the way Amazon compiles its recommendations, that would explain much of my observations, particularly when trying to steer Pandora to an easily describable subset of “Classical” music.
To the best of my knowledge I am not a paid subscriber… nor have I ever been… nor have I ever heard an ad.
Am I really the only one to have such fortune?