

Ask HN:Why is mobile Slate showing me an Ad for carpet installation? - nashequilibrium

I am reading an article about retirement on 401ks on my mobile phone, but at the top i see an add for carpet installation. This is a financial article and i am based in Los Angeles, the Ad is for a carpet upholstery company based in Columbia MD. This is also a click to call ad, is targeting on mobile totally broken since neither my location or content of the article is used in the targeting?
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gregcohn
Have you recently searched on this topic or visited sites related to carpet
upholstery?

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nashequilibrium
No, not at all. I was just surprised how off target this ad was, especially on
location since the context is click to call for installation.

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gregcohn
My guess is it's bad targeting parameters on the part of the company or
whoever is placing ads on their behalf, but it's equally possible that you
picked up an attribute that they are deliberately targeting against, without
your realizing it. (E.g. you're on a VPN running through DC.)

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chewxy
you can chalk this to incompetent ad ops people. When they set up these things
in ad exchanges or DSPs, they simply accidentally (or intentionally) set the
wrong settings for the campaign

