Haunted by a Netflix ad that wouldn't go away, we asked an easy question that led to some complicated answers for the future of online advertising.

Everywhere I look, messages from many brands compete for my gnat-like attention. Outside my house, Paramount plugs its summer film slate on larger-than-life billboards. On the radio, I hear ads to help me refinance the mortgage I don't have and purchase a car I'm not in the market for. The newspaper bombards me with ads for sofas, apparently unaware of the fact that I bought a new couch in January. And my TV, the master of all mass media, actually broadcasts hour-long infomercials on the theory that a 30-second spot is far more compelling than the content it sponsors.

From print, to radio, to outdoor, to TV, advertisers have me surrounded with the most diverse ad ecosystem known to man, but none of it is very good.

To call that ecosystem cluttered would be a massive understatement. The vast majority of those ads will be wasted on me, not because they're not good ads, but because I'm simply not the right audience.

For digital veterans, there's something almost heart-warming about the picture I've just painted. Digital, after all, is the efficient medium; it's where advertisers go to put the exact right message in front of the correct consumer and no one else. Digital is the promise of mass marketing reach combined with the specificity of a door-to-door salesman.

But enough of the sales pitch for digital.

The truth is that digital isn't nearly as close to that promise as you may think (or hope).

"We've only just begun to scratch the surface in terms of how we use all the data we're collecting," says Tim Vanderhook, CEO and co-founder of Specific Media.

I'm talking to Vanderhook for two reasons. First, as the boss at Specific Media, he knows a lot about the minutia of serving ads across the ever-expanding web. But I'm also talking to Vanderhook because one of his ads, a unit served on behalf of Netflix, seems to have locked on to me, and I want to know why.

Love the product, hate the ads
I've got a bone to pick with Netflix. The service is great, the price is right, and I often find myself saying things like, "Why can't my mobile carrier be as wonderful as Netflix?"

But there's one thing I hate about Netflix -- the ads.

It's not that it needs better creative or increased relevancy, it's that the ads seem to be following me, and there's nothing I can do to make them go away.

A little background
I've been a Netflix subscriber for nearly four months now. Despite the fact that it's a relatively minor purchase ($8.99 per month), I kicked the tires on the movie delivery service for more than a year. (Yeah, I'm the guy who blows the math on your sales funnel. Sorry.)

Sometime after completing a trial membership form, and sometime before actually joining Netflix, I began to see pop-under ads for the service. The ads, I reasoned, were part of a not-so-stealthy behavioral targeting campaign to induce me to do what my online behavior indicated I already wanted to do.

The ads may have prompted me to buy, or they may have had little effect. (That's a debate for another article.) But what I couldn't figure out was why, if targeting technology is so good, I was getting an ad for a product I already bought?

Does Netflix dedicate a chunk of its ad budget to annoying me after I do exactly what the company wants?

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