No sir, our marketing team is not Google

Longtime lurker on mobile.

I (23F) work for a strictly online company which is parent to two very specialized (and very different) niches of automotive accessories. We have 26 people in the entire company, i say good morning to the CEO and his VP brother every morning. Our marketing team has done a fantastic job of creating the presence of a large company. If you google any keyword of probably 1000+ strings that could lead you to our website, our sponsored ads will show up. And haunt you, cue Old Man.

Old Man calls in and gets me just after lunch, so i have some energy to put up with BS. He informs me he looked at our website, did not find what he was looking for, and asks if i would stop flooding his screen with our products. I’m fairly young, i know how ads and cookies work. I also knew there was no possible way I could get this man to understand.

I gentally explain how we dont personally send ads to his computer, they are generated by the browser he is using based on websites he’s viewed in the past. Old Man doesnt believe me, asks for the name of and to be sent to the man that has been sending him these popups because he isn’t interested. Nothing else interesting happened except for me being caught in a cycle of no I can’t transfer you, those are called ads, please contact your ISP to learn how to stop them (last ditch attempt to get him off my phone, he couldn’t tell me what browser or search engine he was using so i couldn’t even attempt to help him). Eventually he got off my phone and my coworker closest to me bursts out laughing because I was the only one who had a call that whole time, in an small but spacious office of 6 people including myself, so everyone got to hear my one-sided 8 minutes of dispair.

Other short stories include a man who only repeated “I haven’t got my food stamps”, right around when the US Gov got shutdown for a bit and messed with them and numerous people calling the Parent Company’s # (whose name would mislead most people into thinking we sold eyewear) as oppsed to Automotive Company A or B, asking when they could pick up their glasses.