Day 7 - 7 January 2020
App: Pinterest
Ad: Bright Eyes Book LED Light
Targeted: Unsure
I thought it might be interesting to go back to the same app I picked yesterday and check out whether the ads or pins have changed at all, after clicking on the WWF ad yesterday. Will it show me the same ad again, or something similar? Will it put some animal/ocean themed pins onto my feed? Lets take a look.
Here's what I see when scrolling through Pinterest today: a bullet journal spread, a photo of Lana Del Rey from her Ultraviolence video (not the same photo as yesterday, but I saved yesterday's one!), an ad for an LED book light.
An ad! It's from a website called "Amazious" whose logo looks suspiciously similar to the Amazon logo in terms of font and colour scheme, but it's not Amazon. I'm immediately distrustful of their basic-looking website which has a few products for sale, mostly gadgets, and looks like the sort of online store you might set up as a beginner.
The LED book light is the first 'featured product' on their website and is advertised for £28.09. It's a sheet of clear plastic (presumably it isn't glass) with a strip of LEDs down one side. If you Google search the product name "Bright Eyes Book LED Light" you get a number of websites which all have the exact same description - none of the sites are 'Amazious'. I also found an eBay link where the product is on sale for £5 and found it on Amazon for between £2-£30.
This experiment was meant to see what sort of things the internet would like me to try and buy, but I can see quite clearly that I should not give my banking information to this website and I won't be buying this book light from them. However, I don't have a book light at the moment and do my reading by the light of my bedside lamp, so maybe one day I'll invest in one from a trusted retailer.
As to whether or not this is a targeted ad, it's possible. I have looked at reading challenges on Pinterest and I save a lot of bullet journal inspiration so it would make sense for them to think I'd like a book light. I hope it doesn't think I'm down to get scammed though.
Since I'm not risking that, I've gone back to the first pin, which is the bullet journal spread, and saved it to try on the next page of my journal. It looks like this:
The spread was made by an Instagram user called the.pinecone.planner and they have a lot of cute ideas on their Insta page, if you're looking for inspiration. I'll post a photo of how my spread turns out once it's done!
I'm now a week into the experiment and so far I'm surprised that most of the adverts have been for apps and projects, rather than straight-up asking me to buy things. Going into this, I expected to have spent more money by now so it's cool to have been offered book recommendations and tips on saving the planet from sponsored content instead.
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