Oversharers, beware: if you’ve recently tweeted anything embarrassing–say, how much you drank last night–be prepared to confront ads that directly address your tweets. For example: If you’re browsing a website even without being logged into its Twitter functionality, you might get served a banner ad about a hangover cure, or deals on Stoli.
It’s a new form of big brother-esque hyper-targeted advertising from New York-based startup LocalResponse that, according to a press release, “delivers more relevant ads across all platforms by learning from public consumer intent expressed over public social media channels.”
LocalResponse attaches a cookie to your social media accounts, which allows it to track the things you publicly post about on these platforms. Then, when you’re surfing another website, it can deliver highly-tailored ads based on this content.
This is great news for advertisers, who have long struggled with the best way to reach their most likely customers, as well as content producers who can charge a higher premium for better targeted ads. Plus, it will only pick up on public social media accounts, so your embarrassing statuses on Facebook are safe, as long as your profile is private.
According to the release:
Through its ad display platform, LocalResponse is able to mine public social media channels to find consumers who have expressed interest in a particular brand or lifestyle associated with the brand. LocalResponse then delivers that brand display ad specifically to those consumers who match the criteria of public intent. For example, a ‘tweet’ from a user saying they are looking to trade in their BMW X5 could result in an Audi Q7 banner ad appearing on that same consumer’s desktop.
And we thought Gmail’s ads were creepy.
