Category: Advertisements

Facebook presented me with this:

Ya know, I read that book this summer.

Facebook knows all.

You know if I get a marketing email entitled Proof It! How To Be a Better Proofreader, you’d better believe I’m proofreading it.

Oh, yes, there’s the typo. No, wait, it has two:

Also, bullet point items should consistently end with punctuation or not. Generally, you don’t want to mix and match–even if the outlier is an exclamation point!

On the other hand, it did make me read the email more closely than I would have otherwise. My engagement is up, but my conversion from prospect to sale remains false.

Facebook suggested this post from an outfit called “American Council on Science and Health”

It’s a quote from a film I enjoyed, Secondhand Lions.

The quote starts:

Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in most.

I mean, much of it is about honor, courage, Wuv, True Wuv, and stuff.

But one cannot help wonder how much a non-profit science group that lobbies politicians would prefer we believe things are true even if they’re not. Especially when we’re told them by people with credentials after their name in their email signatures (originally, I was going to say “stationery,” but, c’mon, man, the only stationery with my name on it I have is notepads sent to me as parts of fundraising pitches from organizations much like this).

I support a lot of things, but very few of them have “American” in the name. Not because I’m unpatriotic, but because national organizations too often are grifts.

I might not be a smart man, Jenny, but I know who Janet Yellen is.

And that’s not her.

So Microsoft is throwing up random ads in the home page of the Microsoft Edge Web browser these days, and one of them is clickbait enough to combine a powerful financial figure, a buzzword, and a stock photo of a woman.

But not enough to make me click. Only enough to make me mock.

Facebook sometimes shows me posts from an assortment of old movies and dead celebrities pages such as this one:

I know, I know, and Mary Livingstone was a shop girl and not actually in the show business, so she felt a little insecure about it.

It’s one of those things that my beautiful wife might ask me, “How do you know that?”

In this case, I know how I know. But I won’t tell you… just yet.

So I mentioned to my beautiful wife that I’m working my way, slowly, through Tea in the Time of COVID which I bought in June and which disappeared into the back of the truck, a boy’s room, or both for a while.

I mentioned the author has 100 blog posts, essentially, about the tea mug she’s drinking from (she has a vast collection of hand-crafted tea mugs), the philosophical tweet on her teabag, and a little of what’s going on.

So suddenly, I’m seeing ads for artisanal tea cups on Facebook.

Yeah, that’s a coincidence. Yeah, I’m seeing a pattern where there is none. But given how often I see ads for things I don’t buy online but have talked about, I’d say there is a pattern.

Clearly, I am not the target audience for this ad.

I mean, what would be worse than Hillary Clinton trying to teach me anything? Hillary Clinton trying to teach me two things. And I would have to pay for it.

I’ll stick to secondhand Great Courses and American Scholar material, thanks.

My beautiful wife has taken to gardening and has an indoor garden with a grow light that uses little pods and can grow small herbs, maybe tomatoes, and flowers.

So I was a good target, maybe, for this ad ahead of Christmas:

But, wait a minute, mister. Save $200 now? How expensive is this that everyone can save $200 now?

Gott im Himmel! $1000 plus a monthly membership of $30-40.

I see a lot of ads like that. Save $X now, where X is a lot already. Which generally indicates it’s not something for me.

Wait a minute, Brian J.! Don’t you buy $10 CDs by the bucketful? Don’t you like to write checks greater than that amount for organizations you support? Well, you have me there. And if I need a $1000 home repair, I get the $1000 home repair without thinking. Or a thousand bucks of firewood which is just money going up in smoke, ainna?

But something about $200 gifts which might or might not be liked, or $200 things for myself, tend to make me blanch. Blanch, I said–not make me into a Golden Girl.

I’m sure Dave Ramsey would still go all Patton on me for my spending habits, but there you go.

I dunno why Facebook thought I was in the market for this:

But I’ve got all the navigational beacons I need for my darkened household.

I would, however, be interested in a book on D&D Furniture.

What, you don’t look at the books in advertisements? You probably don’t go right to the bookshelves when you first visit someone’s home to see what they have, either.

Inflation! High gas prices! An incompetent in the White House! Now, my local library brings you…. macrame!

Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. And it will be the mostest and bestest and first time for everythingest for them.

In addition to Twitter sending me inscrutable messages about players in the Indian film industry, Facebook has gotten into the act by showing me promoted posts about Bollywood actresses:

Who the heck is Alia Bhatt? Apparently, she is an Indian-born British actress with a discography.

Continue reading “Big Data Knows I’m A Big Bollywood Fan” →

Apparently, someone of Facebook thinks I am a baseball fan, or that I am so desperate to learn to code that I would like to learn Pandas through either fantasy football or baseball.

C’mon, man, I tell the story of the only software product I was paid to write (over and over, like an old man with five or ten go-to stories to tell over and over), when I was in high school, I wrote a baseball stat manager in BASIC 2.0 for the Commodore 64:

My high school’s baseball team manager paid me $50 for something that could save and calculate the team’s stats.

Funny, in my various dilettante careers, I was most highly paid for poetry.

• Poetry: $100 for “Canny” in There Will Be War Volume X. I think I was supposed to get a share of royalties, too, but I no longer can reach out to my editor to wrench it from the publishing house as he did my flat payment.
• Software development: $50 for Baseball Stats Manager v1.0.
• Short fiction: $5 for “Reading Faces” in Show and Tell magazine.

You know, I guess I have been paid money for nonfiction, including pieces in Writers Journal and History magazines as well as perhaps some cash from Artisan Journal back in the day.

Blogging and self-publishing, though? Money sinks.

Facebook proffers this item for my review:

I really hope that it’s because I’ve posted that an Iron Maiden poster got me a wife.

And not because aforementioned beautiful wife has put an Iron Maiden cassette into the deck in our 2008 vehicle which I’ve been listening to in the mornings taking my oldest to band practice.

Because I’m really close to believing that my phone was also listening and selling that information to shadowy Internet data brokers who passed it onto Facebook.

I did click through, but I am not sure that she would get enough use out of a $50 cooler to buy it for her for Christmas.

I wrote and scheduled this post last night; this morning, in my Facebook memories, I see this post:

Unfortunately, I often run out of Iron Maiden before I run out of work day.

Clearly they saw me coming in 2017.

So I read this article in Chrome with the JavaScript off: ‘Preppers’ Quietly Stock Up for the ‘Perfect Storm’, and it mentions a prepper supply company:

Keith Bansemer, president of My Patriot Supply in Salt Lake City, said his business has grown exponentially amid widespread fears of a return to COVID-19 lockdowns, empty store shelves, and forced vaccinations that will limit personal freedoms.

And I log into Facebook minutes later in a separate browser, and I get:

You know, that’s pretty fast information sharing. Too fast.

An ad for some frippery I saw on Facebook:

I thought, How cool is that! A reversible trenchcoat that turns into a cape!

Oh, but no. It’s just some overpriced “artist” putting your face on some stock portrait background. Which is not something I’m interested in.

A trench coat that you can turn inside out and it’s a cape, now that might be tempting.