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Ad Resistant

This blog has a Facebook page but I do not. Over the years, I have played around with the privacy options, joined and left groups, clicked and ignored ads and videos - always randomly. I take perverse pleasure in seeing what FB thinks I want to consume in terms of content and what persona it tries to assign me. It has been a fascinating experiment and the results have been interesting to say the least. Ad Nauseum takes a simple and clever brute force approach to achieve very similar results with Google. Instead of doing random things, it just clicks all ads and makes it impossible to profile the person. They have to be placed in an out-group for any persona analysis to make sense. I would consider myself very averse to being marketed to and definitely targeted for relevant ads. 

Yet, I always read the Trader Joe's Fearless Flyer when it shows up in my mailbox. There is no targeting of me and none of the content was written with me in mind. But I do read the whole thing, sometimes even stop by at the store to pick up something I read about. That is a solid good conversion metric for any marketer worth their salt. Maybe hold-outs like me and millions of others who will block every single ad they can, will respond better to content like that in the Flyer. There is a story, some humor some silly pictures and a generally an atmosphere that invokes the brand. That feeling sticks long enough to even warrant and unplanned grocery run. That is more than more most ads would do for companies that are fighting both sides - Google to display their ads when and where it makes sense and the end users who don't want to see anything at all.

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