Demographic targeting and implicit messages

So, Facebook's display ads use demographic targeting based on all the information you give them - age, gender, marital status, etc. That's totally fine, and when my status was "engaged" I got a bunch of wedding-planning ads - unsurprising. My husband Dave said he saw the same thing.

Now that my status has changed to "married", though, I'm being targeted with ads for pampers and custom bracelets with your kids' names on them. Ew! I'm guessing that my age (30), marital status and gender are what's triggering these types of ads. Funnily enough, Dave's Facebook profile isn't showing him the same sorts of ads at all - he's seeing ads for clothing. And then you wonder why equal parenting - splitting the childcare responsibility evenly between parents - isn't as simple as it sounds ... you've got this whole shitty cultural system telling you in a bunch of different ways that women = responsible for kids = supposed to want kids. Also, of course, that marriage = children. No wonder women and men absorb these messages - advertising is just an obvious manifestation of the phenomenon.

This has another dimension for me personally, which is that I write and run some ads which could potentially appear on Facebook. Not the ads I've been talking about - I'm not currently handling any display advertising or working with demographically targeted ads, but I do advertise with MSN, and MSN has a deal with Facebook for advertising. So here I am, ranting from inside the belly of the beast. Ah, sweet ironies of life.

Work clothes

A friend of mine started a very good media internship at the beginning of summer. She’s a mother and a grad student and hip, always looks great. But she was carping about needing new clothes to look “proper” for her job.

This is something that I think about a lot. I have to go out and talk to people for my work and the vibe needs to be such that what I’m wearing, how I look, doesn’t get in the way of our communication. I need to be neutral, almost not even there. I want my sources to talk to me as they would talk to themselves in the shower (…wait, most people talk in the shower, don’t they?...) without trying to frame their message to the person opposite them with a notebook and pen.

That’s a complicated way of saying that I don’t want a retiring businesswoman that I’m profiling to look at me and go, ‘Oh, a Temescal hipster, she won’t understand.’

At the same time, I need to feel comfortable in my own professional role, which means not wearing clothes I can’t stand. I want to walk into any interview situation with confidence and grace – and feeling like ‘me.’ Too drab and I feel old (a whole other problem).

So it’s all about the clothes. On one hand, I want to look tidy and respectable, on the other hand I want to look hip and interesting to give my own confidence a boost.

This means, the bigger the interview the more time I spend choosing what to wear, yet I always end up wearing the same things.
Should I be free of props and baggage? Maybe so.

All those pajama blogger types out there have moved past this, of course. They are post-wardrobe.