Christo: Hi there! Welcome back to Basic Bananas TV. In this video tip, I want to answer the question, “Are Google and Apple really listening to you?” So not that long ago I was on the beach and I was actually just about to head out for a surf and a friend was on the beach filming, filming some friends, and another surfer came out of the water and we started to have a conversation about earplugs. And while we’re having that conversation me and the other surfer, my friend who was filming, pulled out his phone and started playing around and he said, “Oh my goodness, the earplugs that you guys just mentioned…” showed up in his Facebook feed just like that, he said “I’ve never searched them before and you’re talking about them,” we’re on the beach I didn’t have my phone with me the other guy’s just come out of the surf obviously, he’s soaking wet and he says it’s just showing up, you know they must be “listening,” and we hear it all the time that they must be listening. Now the thing is, as far as I’m aware, and believe they’re not listening… what happens here is that you can do targeting say, on Facebook and Instagram, for example, you can target people who like a page and their friends. So let’s just say if I had previously liked the page of this earplug brand these surfing earplugs and then it sees that I am connected with him and just the fact that we’re talking about it there and then because a lot of the advertising campaigns you might get tens of thousands of impressions like a lot of people see the ads but the fact that we’ve just had a conversation makes him actually recognise
the ad and see it. However, Facebook can see that you know or Instagram, both of them are managed by the same platform; can see that he’s a friend of mine, and can see that he has similar interests, so he can also obviously target based on interests which he’s interested in surfing so that could be another targeting that’s made the ad appear to him. And also, you can create look-alike audiences based on people who have previously bought the
product. So I had actually bought that product in the past even though it might have been a month before or two months before, they likely have an audience~ a targeting audience which they say, target look-alikes—people who have similar interests to people who have already bought the products, and you can, with a lot of database systems now, you can synchronise them together like Facebook and your database so your database is getting “who’s buying, who’s buying, who’s buying” feeding that data back to Facebook and then Facebook’s going, “Okay, these
people are buying, who’s similar to them? Who’s similar to them? Let’s show the ads,” so then just like magic we think it’s showing up. Another scenario is Google, for instance, it keeps track and monitors your map searches, your Google searches, and video watches. You might watch a video on Youtube about earplugs or something like that, then you have a conversation with someone about it and then it shows up. Like they’re monitoring these different areas or you’ve simply done… let’s say you wanted to buy some pet food and you put into Google Maps, “Petbarn,” you went to the Petbarn shop and you never searched it on your laptop, you never looked up their website, you never looked at a video or anything like that, you never did a Google search but you went there and you used the map on your phone. Now, you’ve gone there and used the map. Google sees that and then you get home that night you tell someone, “Oh I went to Petbarn today, had a great time,” and then you open your computer and there’s a Petbarn banner advertisement and you think, “Oh my goodness, it was listening!” the reality was it’s just that you went there, you’ve shown interest by doing that search in the day where it could get slightly more spooky is location tracking. So you might have location tracking activated
within your apps. This one’s a little bit of a gray area but it might be that you’ve used gone to a place or location. Your location tracking was on, Google’s recognised that you’ve gone in there, you know, you might have location tracking open in the maps for example, and you’ve gone to that venue, so it tracks “okay you’ve gone there, you have interest in that location, and then we’ll show you you know advertising based on that”. So the real answer is, “no, they’re not listening” unless of course, you have voice activation turned on on devices but the devices will only be listening when you trigger by if it’s Apple, of course saying “hey Siri,” or if it’s Apple, saying you know, “hey Apple,” or “wake up,” whatever the trigger word is, and then that activates it to listen and that’s a proactive search obviously on your behalf. But I trust this has given you some clarification, and probably some good audiences that you could target for your own business. So there you go. If you’ve got anything you’d like to share on this or any freaky stories of when you’re sure that Google or Apple has been listening, please comment, share it with us, send us through… comment it here, so we can keep it in the same thread it’d be really interesting to see, and we’ll see if we can work them out for you, work out what’s happened for you, if you’ve got an interesting example or just a crazy one, we always like to hear them as well. Trust you’ve enjoyed this episode and let’s continue with our research into whether they’re listening or not by commenting and hopefully, see you on an episode soon. Bye for now.