Contextual Advertising

In the old days, when your grandparents took to the streets in their motor carriages and chose among four potential channels on their seven-inch televisual presenter, there wasn't a lot of opportunity to target advertising. The strategy was mass marketing. Billboards. Broad advertising campaigns. Little twenty-word text boxes in the corners of (paper-printed) magazines and newspapers.

Time has gone by. Now, we have what's called "contextual advertising." It's ad material specifically targeted to you.

Because companies can gather a lot of information about you based on your online presence and your smartphone use, they're able to present ads specifically designed to appeal to the type of products you buy (or at least the type of products people like you buy). These usually appear in things like websites and browsers, or in apps or other online media.