Sometimes it seems like our tech devices are monitoring our every move, and this story about one man’s experience with targeted advertising only serves to confirm that suspicion: This man just got an ad for Corn Nuts on his phone after Googling Corn Nuts 91 times and watching 26 videos about Corn Nuts and talking about Corn Nuts for three hours straight and ordering Corn Nuts march from five different vendors and downloading 91 photos of Corn Nuts.
Whoa. Cue the Twilight Zone theme song, because this is some truly creepy stuff.
Eighty-three-year-old retired bank president Jimmy Lee Wilson had something unusual happen to him recently. After a day spent on his phone doing hundreds of Corn Nuts-related activities, he noticed something strange on Instagram, where he exclusively follows Corn Nuts related accounts: An ad for Corn Nuts. At first he did a double take, wondering if he might be seeing things, or if perhaps some of the Corn Nuts imagery he had been viewing for the past twelve hours straight had burned itself into his retinas. But sure enough, there it was: An add displaying three packages of Corn Nuts alongside the slogan “Corn to the Core.”
“It almost feels like someone is watching me,” said Jimmy Lee after the frightful incident, practically shaking with fear in his Corn Nuts-branded, shirt, pants, and baseball cap. “I was just minding my own business, editing the Corn Nuts Wikipedia page and using AI to write Corn Nuts themed operas, and there it was. An advertisement for the very thing I’d been obsessively researching, exclusively consuming, and quite literally worshiping for years. Not that I minded seeing an ad for Corn Nuts, quite the contrary. It’s just a little strange that they were able to pinpoint my interests so accurately.”
Wow. This type of freaky occurrence is likely only going to become more common in our age of increasing tech surveillance.
This disturbing episode definitely doesn’t seem like a coincidence, so Jimmy Lee may well be seeing another ad for Corn Nuts sometime soon. We think it’s fair to say that from now on, as he repeatedly types “CORN NUTS” into the comment sections of hundreds of videos on YouTube and calls in to financial advice webcasts to ask them how many bags of Corn Nuts he should buy with the money in his retirement fund, Jimmy Lee is going to be plagued by a nagging feeling that someone out there is keeping an eye on him.
