How do I get rid of targeted Contextual Ads?

Online Retail: Could companies benefit from a "already own" or "bought elsewhere" option on targeted ads? How about in targeted e-mails?

• As a consumer I get really tired of seeing ads targeted to my recent browsing history when I've bought the item somewhere else. As a marketer I don't see much benefit to continue spending ad dollars on a consumer who's completed the purchase cycle elsewhere. Thoughts?

• Answer:

  The idea has merit - it would certainly reduce your annoyance and possibly save the advertiser some money. The challenges I see are technical barriers to determining whether you've purchased something or not. In order for this to be feasible, the system serving the ad must be aware that you've already purchased the product. I'm not a programmer, but I think this is a challenging problem to solve. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting generally works based on cookies. In order to be programmatically aware that you've already purchased the product elsewhere, that purchasing information would need to be communicated in those cookies and the retargeting system would need to know how/where to look for that information. There isn't really any incentive for competing retailers to make this information publicly available, so the advertiser would need to collect that data and make it publicly accessible. That presents security/privacy concerns as well as technical challenges: the additional checking & verification needs to occur any time a retargeted ad is served, increasing bandwidth consumption and page latency. The advertiser, the ad networks, and major media partners would all need to be convinced that the positive potential outweighs the costs. Taking a step back, it's also worth considering whether there's a customer or business benefit to serving ads for products a customer has already purchased. The evaluation would need to be made per-business and per-product type, but some possible ideas include: Driving repurchases of consumables Advertising a lower price, i.e. helping the customer find the best deal and/or possibly incenting them to return/repurchase Sustaining brand awareness through repeated exposure Encouraging additional purchases as gifts