About an hour after reading this blog post and the thread here on HN, I opened Instagram. The very first ad was from Lego, for their orrery.
It was so specific and unique (I can’t recall ever seeing an ad from Lego on IG at all) that it must have been targeted by some behavioral data on me.
But from where? HN and the blog do not seem to be running the Meta pixel, and I was using Safari on iOS, which blocks 3rd party cookies.
After some recollection, I remembered that I had clicked play on one of the YouTube videos that are embedded in the blog post. So Lego must have Google ads running that target people who view these orrery project videos.
It was so specific and unique (I can’t recall ever seeing an ad from Lego on IG at all) that it must have been targeted by some behavioral data on me.
But from where? HN and the blog do not seem to be running the Meta pixel, and I was using Safari on iOS, which blocks 3rd party cookies.
After some recollection, I remembered that I had clicked play on one of the YouTube videos that are embedded in the blog post. So Lego must have Google ads running that target people who view these orrery project videos.