This is the reality of advertising in 2013. Online advertising has quickly transformed from mass media irrelevance to pop-up annoyance to heavily targeted, eerily personal advertisements thanks in part to two of the largest intimate information banks: Google and Facebook. Between the two, Google generates almost 30 billion ad impressions each day compared with Facebook's 7 billion, and those numbers are only increasing, raising concerns about whether we have the ad literacy or cognitive ability to keep pace with the future of advertising.
The targeted and social advertising techniques employed by Google and Facebook aren't necessarily a bad thing — more relevant, less intrusive advertising arguably makes our lives simpler and easier. But as Google and Facebook continue to refine their use of two of the most exhaustive data sets on human behavior, our cognitive limitations may become even more apparent. As advertisements become entangled with advice from a good friend and tap further into this realm of things you never knew existed but always wanted, the data giants continue to forge ahead while the human brain's ability to process information remains largely the same.