I’m used to seeing TechEd ads on many of the sites that I go to since they are developer sites. So it took a few minutes for it to register when I saw the ad on the website of our local newspaper, the Burlington Free Press.
I’ve been seeing them frequently for days now. This is a pretty small market and it’s surprising to me that they would be advertising here, but perhaps it’s part of a sweeping media buy and they didn’t explicitly choose Burlington. If I didn’t know better, I’d really wonder if they just weren’t using spyware to detect that I have VIsual Studio on my computer and therefore serving up this perfectly targetted ad. There are also a few other Microsoft ads showing up there, for example, one for MS Online Services.
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I don’t think it’s coincidence, actually.These ad companies are getting very good at tracking what sites you visit.The key here is that there are common companies serving up ads to a lot of different sites.Since ads are often displayed in an iframe, or a flash file hosted at the advertising company, that server can either put a cookie on your machine or track your IP address when you go to some major techy site.Then when you visit your local newspaper, who uses the same company to provide ads, the advertising company knows that you were at that techy site, so go ahead and show you techy ads here too.Very slick stuff!:-)