Yet there are limits for what people accept without being uncomfortable. In robots and animation, that has long been termed the 'uncanny valley' - where something is not lifelike enough to look real but too lifelike to be acceptable. Some digital marketing has its own uncanny valley; where it becomes unsettling. Examples are people who say they mentioned something in the presence of their Amazon Echo and then ads on Facebook began to target them.
It's technically impressive, but even more creepy. You feel like you're walking around London and being monitored all of the time, except on your phone.
It doesn't backfire on the technology backbone, it backfires on the companies in the ads, making you less likely to buy that brand even if you expressed interest in the general product. We all recognize we are under constant surveillance but resent when it becomes too obvious, according to a recent paper.
With over 1,800 online participants across three studies, the authors targeted some with advertisements for things like Nike sneakers and fabricated headphones after those were mentioned. The control groups were not digitally targeted. Then people rated how uncomfortable they felt and the authors created a Component Process Model of Creepiness.
It is pretty on-the-nose, even for the humanities, this was an online experiment using people paid through Amazon Mechanical Turk, not the normal population, but 75 percent who expressed discomfort were concerned about the manipulation and surveillance aspects of the technology. These are surveys, not behavior, and therefore only EXPLORATORY, but on a 7-point scale for intent to purchase, the authors said a 1-point increase in discomfort meant willingness to purchase the product by half a point.
Like people who declared they are boycotting Paramount Plus because the company is buying Warner Brothers Discovery but never subscribed to either, their opinions mean little. Bud Light, on the other hand, had a very real, very dramatic turn in revenue when they sought to use advertising to do more than sell beer.
That is what needs to be considered. If someone is searching for a product, they probably want to buy it, and for most people price/value overrules the fact that they got a targeted ad after searching for it on another device. Some of us even game the system; if I see something I might like but it is from weird name in a Facebook ad, I click on it and then click back, knowing a few minutes later a company that isn't some Chinese drop-shipper will advertise it to me.
So companies are probably still smart to target people digitally, even considering blowback. Because advertising is about, as car executives in the 1960s said, "moving the iron", not being worried about whether or not someone is annoyed. If your recents are decent and your price is competitive, you are winning just the same.
Citation: Petrova, A., L.Malär, W.Hoyer, and H.Krohmer. 2026. “The Phenomenon of Creepiness in a Digital Marketing World.” Psychology&Marketing43: 834–851. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mar.70089
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