I broke a friend’s eyeglasses.  We were playing tennis, I hit a shot I shouldn’t have hit and the ball caught the side of Jeff’s frames.  The lens went one way, the frames went another and Jeff had broken glasses and a black eye to show for my mistake.

I told Jeff I wanted to replace his glasses.  After a lot of back and forth (“You are not buying me new glasses!” and “Oh yes I am buying you new glasses.”), he finally told me the website where he had purchased them.  I went to the site a few hours later.  That’s when the cyber stalking began.

Thanks to a piece of code that detected me shopping for glasses, a competing eyeglasses company made me its prey.  Their ads chased me relentlessly no matter what web pages I visited for the next two weeks.

It made me wonder:  “Are consumers as fed up with this kind of online pursuit as me?”

It is called retargeting.  You visit a website that sells boots, for example.  The boot seller knows you have visited and begins sending you online ads about the boots you clicked on.  Hey, here are those boots you saw.  Don’t forget about our boots.  Those boots you like are now 30 percent off.

Consumers don’t want businesses and brands following them.
Use the power of retargeting/re-marketing wisely.

A 2016 survey found that more than 40 percent of adults ages 35 to 44 are so annoyed with retargeting they wouldn’t click on those ads for any reason—even if the ads contained great offers.  Other age groups expressed the same frustration, although not quite as much as the 35 to 44 year olds.

That irritation could be even greater now.  The survey was done two years ago, before some of the high-profile privacy compromises we have learned of involving social media giants.

There are lessons to be learned.  For the tennis player, hit better shots that don’t break your opponent’s glasses.  For the marketer, rethink retargeting.  Consumers don’t like it, they don’t want it and if your company is involved in doing it, you may be causing more harm than good.