Yeah, I've been in a meeting with nobody using the internet and our phones just merely sitting our pockets. 3 hours later I saw ads relevant to the conversation in the meeting, for which, again, I had not googled or used internet for, on Instagram.
I'm guessing at least one person in the room was on android and syncing with gcal.
A few days later one of these friends calls me asking how is it possible that he's seeing Bitcoin ads everywhere after we talked. I also thought that's Baader-Meinhof happening, but it doesn't make ads any less creepy.
This is all suppositions of course, I have no idea how it works. But I've tried this experiment with my gf once:
We both opened Instagram and started talking about a product class that we never saw ads for there, say like shampoos. We even mentioned a few brands and then waited for the ads to hit us. They never did.
EDIT We use iPhones
Nice, let's call this technique "advertisement by osmosis" :-)
It's a particularly bad case of opaque naming, because even knowing about the terms that make it up gives you no clue what it means (since it doesn't reference the Baader-Meinhof Gang, but instead presumably the experience of the person who coined the term around the time they first encountered the name “Baader-Meinhof Gang”.)
Further shortening to “Baader-Meinhof” (perhaps a result of mistaking the name for being named after the discoverers, which would be less opaque, like the Dunning-Kruger Effect, where familiarity with the work of the researchers in question makes the term less opaque) actually makes the term worse, since then it seems like a direct reference or analogy to the group.
For me, it happened with my Google Now feed and the Netflix show Riverdale (not my cup of tea, but my wife was watching it).