A few months ago, I did something I’ve never done before. I saw a CTV ad for a product I needed and got so annoyed about it that I bought a competitor’s version out of spite.
Why? Because the ad was for a pregnancy test, and I’m fairly certain it was served to me because, earlier that day, I had searched online for the phrase, “When’s the right time to take a pregnancy test?”
It wasn’t the first time I’d ever seen a pregnancy test ad, of course. About 10 years ago, when I was stuck at home between layoffs (ah, the perks of a career in media!), I saw them on Hulu all the time, alongside ads for all kinds of family products I had no use for – diapers, baby food, toddler toys, etc.
The logic of the modern ad tech industry suggests that I should have resented seeing these ads, because they were not relevant to me at the time. Maybe I did. I’ll be honest, I don’t actually remember. In any case, I knew I was watching during a time of day traditionally reserved for stay-at-home moms and housewives, so it didn’t feel so unusual. Or, perhaps I should say, it didn’t feel so targeted.
I’ll admit that my daily ad exposure has declined since then, despite my current role covering the ad tech industry. I deleted Facebook and X years ago, and my Instagram and TikTok both lie dormant. Almost every TV subscription we have in our household, including YouTube, is ad-free. I switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo on my personal devices, not for privacy reasons but because it’s easier to hide those annoying AI results.
But lo and behold, the pregnancy test ad still found me on Roku’s “Law and Order” FAST channel.
I’m still not 100% sure how it found me, though. Maybe I absent-mindedly used Google on my work laptop instead of DuckDuckGo on my personal one. Maybe it was a pixel on the health care website I eventually clicked on. I know it wasn’t my phone listening to me, at the very least, so that takes one popular conspiracy theory off the table.
Regardless of how it made its way to my television, however, the ad had the opposite of its intended effect. My first thought wasn’t, “I should buy that brand.” It was, “I haven’t even told my husband yet! Leave me alone!”
Which is funny because, on paper at least, it was exactly the “right time” to serve this kind of ad. I’d demonstrated a clear interest in the product, after all. And, presumably, there’s only a short window of time between when most women consider buying a test and before they actually do, so the programmatic buying process has to work quickly in order for the ad to be successful.
And it was! It found me.
The problem is, “reaching the right consumer at the right time” – the online ad industry’s favorite and now-cliché refrain – is not the exact science that folks would have you believe. And it can’t be, because the full spectrum of human behavior cannot truly be quantified. Nor can it be contained by even the most meticulously constructed marketing persona.
A persona, for example, cannot wrestle with complicated feelings about raising a child in an increasingly hostile and expensive world. It cannot fear losing its identity to the institution of motherhood or worry about its own health and safety and the physical trauma of birth.
To be fair, I’m not sure I could have articulated these concerns in the moment the ad was served to me – not in the middle of watching an old episode of “Law and Order,” at least. (“SVU,” maybe?) But that’s actually part of the problem. Yes, the ad reached me when I was ready to make a purchase decision, but not when I was emotionally ready to grapple with the larger implications.
And mine is not even the worst-case scenario. Imagine, for example, that the same pregnancy test ad was served to someone who didn’t actually want to be pregnant. Imagine if it showed up in the household of a scared teenager or in a state where abortion has effectively been criminalized. Or in the home of a domestic abuse victim, where their abuser could possibly see it, too.
This kind of thing has happened before. Target caught a lot of flak in 2012 when The New York Times reported on a controversial marketing tactic the retailer once implemented to target pregnant consumers. Using purchase history from baby shower registries, Target’s data team developed a “pregnancy score” that could be assigned to other female customers for the explicit purpose of sending them baby-related coupons as early as possible.
Target’s prediction model was so accurate that it inadvertently outed at least one pregnant high schooler to her father, who called a Minnesota store location to complain about the coupons being sent to his house under his daughter’s name before calling again to admit that they were correct after all.
Unsurprisingly, nowhere in the NYT’s article does it mention how the girl herself reacted to this invasion of privacy. However, Target did find that being too obvious in its targeting tactics would cause women to “react badly,” according to one executive. But instead of stopping altogether, the marketing department started putting decoy ads into its personalized coupon booklets to obfuscate the fact that Target knew its recipients were pregnant.
Setting aside the ethical concerns related to that particular form of camouflage, it’s not something that’s possible in a CTV ad strategy. Every brand is competing for the same inventory, so they’re not about to collude to make one brand in a group more palatable to viewers. But do you know what is possible? Pulling back just a little bit on the industry’s obsession with performance while investing a bit more in brand awareness.
And I don’t just mean awareness as in how familiar a customer is with your brand. I also mean being aware that people live entire emotional lives outside of your funnel.
If that pregnancy test brand hadn’t rushed to meet me at the very first sign of intent, I probably would’ve purchased it without thinking twice, based solely on my prior knowledge of the brand. But the speed and precision of the targeting made it feel less like marketing and more like surveillance, which made me less inclined to bring that brand home with me – not when it had already showed up there uninvited.
📣 🌟 Coming soon!Just a reminder that we’re making some changes to the CTV roundup! Starting next week, we’ll start appearing in your inbox twice a week under a new name, Streamlined, which we think better reflects our mission to bring you all the latest streaming ad tech news. We’re also going to start sharing newsletters from our sister publication, Cynopsis, which is chock full of insights about the TV business.
In the meantime, let us know what you think via email (victoria@adexchanger.com).
For more articles featuring Victoria McNally, click here.
