When Did Retargeting Get So Creepy?

I find it creepy. It is a good thing I don’t follow New York Times reporters on Twitter or you might find that splashed across a major paper today. These days I feel like I see completely incongruous ads showing on inventory and I know they tracked me there. (I have not read the Times article or any other related articles, for what its worth.)

(This is “LeadBack” or retargeting, as explained on the Ad.com Japan site today. Notice how the cookie looks like a golden coin!)

As the story was told to me, John Ferber was actually the person that invented retargeting. He had a bolt of lightning in his brain one day that made him see how the technology that was being used for analytics and conversion pixels could be applied to deliver ads to people after they had visited a website and he named this “Advertiser LeadBack”. (Advertiser LeadBack is a designated trademark of Advertising.com, a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL) Advertiser LeadBack was a phenomenally successful product...