I have a confession to make. I love targeted ads.
It’s so satisfying to see the exact skirt I searched for yesterday show up in my Instagram feed today, or to stumble upon a new gadget I didn’t know I needed while flipping through Facebook. It feels good to be known, like getting the perfect birthday gift I hadn’t even thought to ask for, or getting a call from a friend right when I need them.
I know plenty of people feel differently about targeted advertising, including my own esteemed colleagues. Many security experts and regular web users regard targeted ads—which rely on tracking your web activity—as creepy and invasive. And I absolutely respect that. Targeted advertising, also called behavioral advertising, works best when companies collect and share personally identifiable information about you. Privacy advocates and concerned citizens do not want companies to harvest a user’s data and sell it to advertisers, and some in the US have pushed the issue all the way to the Congress and even the State of the Union address. Privacy is important to the health of the internet, and I understand why people don’t want to feel like they live in the panopticon.
But since targeted ads are, at least for now, inevitable, I’m going to take advantage of them.
Shopping overwhelms me. I’m talking frozen-in-the-alternative-milk-section-of-Whole-Foods-while-soccer-moms-shove-me-out-of-the-way kind of overwhelmed. This happens everywhere—grocery stores, Nordstrom, Goodwill, and even online. I walk in, see all the options, I’m paralyzed by indecision, and walk out empty-handed. Or the opposite happens and I walk out with everything I’ve never needed. Or I order the wrong-sized dress online and forget to mail it back for a refund. Or I add shorts to my e-shopping cart, get distracted, and don’t go back until they’re sold out.
What does any of this have to do with targeted ads? Let’s say I see a sweater on an Instagram ad I really love, but before I check out, I realize this is a purchase for another paycheck. Others might leave the sweater in their cart and come back to it on payday. Others may use a bookmarking service like Pinterest or Pinboard. Those solutions don’t always work for me. It’s very likely I may not remember I wanted to buy the sweater, that I wouldn’t remember what brand it was, which website to go to, or that I even bookmarked it. (Truly, I have about 40 tabs open on my phone of things I wanted to remember and never did.)
Then I figured out that if I click on an ad for something I know I eventually want to buy, it will likely repopulate on my social media feeds through targeted advertising. Those ads will then start to serve as little reminders to myself. It’s an easy system. I simply click on an ad, and it pops back up in my feed over and over again until I have the means (or the time) to buy the thing. These targeted ads have become like my own personal secretary pool.
Ad-HD
I used to think this was an inherent, inescapable personality trait, or another symptom of my generalized anxiety. Then, my physician told me the symptoms I have likely point to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, commonly known as ADHD. With this more recent self-discovery, I’m seeking an official diagnosis, working on a treatment plan, and constantly learning more about how these symptoms acutely impact my day-to-day life, from how I clean to how I work to even how I shop.
Kenny Handelman, a clinical psychologist and author of the book Attention Difference Disorder, clued me in that it’s no surprise that shopping with ADHD is such a struggle. He explained that there are three symptoms at play in this instance: lack of impulse control, executive dysfunction, and prospective memory issues.
A person who lacks impulse control could typically act quickly without considering the consequences. For somebody like me, that means purchases can sometimes pile up quickly as I buy things without asking myself if I actually need them. Executive dysfunction is the difficulty or inability to perform more mundane tasks, such as mailing back that ill-fitting or unflattering pair of jeans you’ve been meaning to return. Prospective memory—or remembering to remember things —can manifest itself in either forgetting you wanted to buy something, blowing off your budget, or forgetting you’d been meaning to save money for something else entirely. These symptoms can combine to add unnecessary financial stressors to your life and create an unenjoyable shopping experience.
