Digital marketing ^2

Last Wednesday afternoon, after finishing up a long day at work, I sign onto my email and read an email from my digital marketing professor. I see we need to write a blog post, so I click on the link in the email, and what's the first thing I see? A huge digital ad. On a blog about digital marketing. And this isn't just any ad. It's targeted just for me. It's for a B2B healthcare business that I happened to have a call for work just a few hours earlier. In the past, I would have been shocked. I would have questioned if it was a coincidence. I might have asked a friend if they say saw the same ad or opened up a new browser to see if the same ad would be there. And it might have made me angry. I would have questioned the audacity of this company to be following me around the internet and doing it so blatantly. Whether I would have had that reaction five years ago or ten years ago, it's hard to say. That transition to being bombarded with hyper-specific targeting is so complete that it's hard to remember a time when the internet was not this way. Google anything and ads can be expected in social media feeds or while browsing the news. Shop on the internet and put something in your cart without paying... Then you're bound to get bombarded with emails with discounts and even more ads all over the internet. What struck me while looking at that ad was not how shocking it was but instead, how commonplace. Of course that ad would be there. Even on a digital marketing blog for a digital marketing class. We expect to be tracked wherever we go. Though it may be hard to say when it happened, it has become something we have decided to accept completely.