I had a friend who joined a Blockbuster fan page on Facebook. Suddenly his picture was showing up in ads on my profile saying that he endorsed Blockbuster. Later, I ordered some fried basil tofu and some mango sticky rice on seamlessweb.com, an online food delivery service. I go back to my Facebook profile and look at my feed:

"Marc justed ordered fried basil tofu and mango sticky rice from Benny's Thai." What? I thought I was pretty internet savvy but it took me a good minute to realize that a cookie from Seamless web read by Facebook was responsible.

I immediately disabled the Seamlessweb feed from my profile. I'm not a Japanese baseball player, so the world does not need to know what I eat for lunch, or breakfast or dessert. Hey, I realize you guys were trying to be helpful, but next time ASK first, you creepy bastards.

About a week ago I went to Boulder on a business trip. It was one of those get there the night before, have a meeting and fly back before you even realize you're in another time zone deals. I stayed at La Quinta right by the airport since I had to meet someone at the car rental counter early in the morning. Now suddenly La Quinta seems to be doing a major online advertising push: at me.

If I use another web browser, suddenly the ads go away. But if I use the computer or the browser that I used when I was booking the hotel online, there's La Quinta, offering me a discount.

Consumers are not stupid. And there's no such thing as a coincidence. Before I opted for their cheap rate, I had never even heard of them, let alone seen a banner ad. Now they're everywhere I look. What's next, an experiential marketing campaign conveniently targeted outside my office?

If you're using hypertargeting, maybe brands who have real consumer love like Nike are better off doing it, since they always seem to know the appropriate way to pull something like that off. For everyone else, remember there's a fine line between targeting the right people and being creepy.