What is this advertising sorcery?!

[Mumsymumphy]

I was reading a thread on here about cats and someone had mentioned in a reply about cats liking drinking from a water fountain. I didn't know this so thought I'd check cat fountains out on ebay/Amazon with the possibility of getting one for my cats- but I never got round to even searching/looking.

Just been on my Facebook and lo and behold there's an advert for a cat fountain! Never even seen one before.

What sorcery is going on here?! Can Google (or whoever) read our minds now? AIBU to think the robots are taking over!?

I'm going to think about 'ways to make a million pounds in 10 seconds' and see what pops up in my FB tomorrow 😆👾👾

I always say if you are not being sold to, then you are the one being sold!

Yesterday DP and I were discussing my friends new baby and her name - friend’s surname is the same as a semi obscure clothing brand so we also talked about that a bit. Lo and behold, today I was targeted some jackets by that same obscure brand!

It's the same on Facebook and Instagram. DP and I were talking about archery the other day - never have done before - and we were both served archery-based Insta ads in the next hour or so.

Instagram also seems to use facial/photo monitoring for the same purpose. Most of my photos are of me wearing either my glasses or sunglasses and my cats - all I get are cat-related tat and contact lens ads.

I have read threads on Mumsnet then opened another thread and had adverts for something mentioned in the previous thread that I hadn't even thought of looking up. Same with looking at news articles etc, can find ads on next article I look at relating to something mentioned in previous article.

I think some cookies look for key words on web pages and put linked adverts in.