Instagram tried to sell me a bus
I got an Instagram ad for a bus. Not a car. A Volvo bus, the kind with the reclining seats or a bed that you take from Bangalore to Goa. I'm not sure what I would do with one. I don't have a fleet, I don't run a travel company, and my parking situation can barely handle my car. But there it was, between many cat reels, asking me to enquire about pricing.
I did enquire, by the way. Not with Volvo, but with Google. I now know what a bus costs, how the 9600 is different from the 9400, and that Volvo's bus business in India is run by VECV, its joint venture with Eicher Motors. Useful if I am ever to start a fleet or a travel business. That is how well the ad worked.
Anyway. Here is how I ended up there, how it reminded me of one of the many things I do at work, and why you should not upgrade your phone frequently.
How to Get Yourself a Volvo Ad
I use a Samsung Fold 6 for work, and I keep it strictly for work. No personal apps, no doomscrolling, nothing. But some time ago I had to install Instagram on it for "work", and that is when the bus showed up. Along with ads to set up a plastics manufacturing unit, invest in a REIT, and whatnot. Basically, Instagram had decided that I am a man of means. The Fold is two years old now, but a fold is niche and pricey enough that advertisers still assume its owner has money.
Meanwhile, right up until that install, my iPhone 17 had been showing me protein powder and shoes.
Nothing about me had changed between those two Instagram sessions. Same salary, same bank balance, same guy who thinks twice before ordering anything on my wishlist. The only difference was the phone in my hand. That's when it clicked: the ads on my iPhone had been getting cheaper for a while, and I hadn't even registered it. More on that in a bit.
Quick Detour on How This Works
Most people know ads are targeted. What people don't usually think about is that every marketing team is chasing one number: CAC, customer acquisition cost. Spend a lakh on ads, get 100 customers; your CAC is a thousand rupees. Marketing's whole job is to get that number down, and the easiest way is to not waste money on people who won't buy.
One of the cheapest signals about whether someone will buy is the phone they are holding. Meta and Google both let you target by exact phone model. So if you are selling something for 30 lakh, you show it to people on a Samsung Fold or an iPhone Pro Max and skip the rest, because someone who pays 1.5 lakh for a phone every two years without blinking is a better bet. This is not even a new trick. Orbitz was doing it in 2012, showing Mac users the pricier hotels first.
These lists also get rebuilt every time new phones launch. So a 13 Pro Max that made every premium list in 2021 had dropped off most of them by 2024. A base iPhone still counts as premium, just not that premium, so it sits a bracket below the Pros and the Folds.
And once you do buy something from an ad, that is what marketing calls a conversion. Instagram takes note, tells the next advertiser, "he buys, and he likes books", and that advertiser pays a little more to reach you. Every purchase makes you a more valuable target. It compounds, like a bad SIP. The good news is it works in reverse too. Ignore ads for long enough, and the algorithm slowly gets bored of you.
And it is not just ads anymore. The same signal is now used for personalised pricing, or what most people loosely call dynamic pricing, where the app decides what to charge you based on who it thinks you are. Last year the government sent notices to Ola and Uber for charging iPhone users more for the same cab ride, and days later a Bengaluru woman posted screenshots of Zepto showing the same capsicum at Rs 21 on Android and Rs 107 on her iPhone. The companies denied it, but nobody found it hard to believe. Your phone is the first thing these apps look at, and now it decides not just what you get shown, but what you pay.
The Part I Hadn't Connected
I had my iPhone 13 Pro Max for four years. And now that I think back, the luxury car ads I used to get on Instagram and Google, despite already owning a car, had thinned out well before I switched. Somewhere around year two or three, without doing anything, I had quietly slid out of the expensive bracket. A brand-new Pro Max says, "this person spends, and spends now". A four-year-old one says, "this person is stingy; let's send him cheaper products". That's when the shoe brands and Amazon pick you.
Then I bought the base iPhone 17 instead of the Pro Max last year, mostly because my hands were done with the weight and I wanted to have less screen time on my phone. And since the top-end lists are built from the Pro and Fold models, the base 17 moved me a bracket lower. Two accidental "downgrades" in a row, and my feed is making me spend far less.
So, One More Reason
The usual reasons not to upgrade are money and the fact that phones have stopped getting better. This year you can add the RAMpocalypse to the list, where the AI data centres have bought up all the memory, the Pixel 11 Pro costs 100 dollars more than last year and ships with less RAM, and Apple raised the price of my one-year-old iPhone 17 by 100 dollars just last month. All fair. I would add this one: the phone in your pocket is a label, and advertisers read it before anything else. Hold on to your phone for a few years, or buy the model that is good enough for you, and the label falls off on its own. And going by that Zepto capsicum, the label changes your prices too.
This is not a cure for consumerism. I still get ads, and clearly they still work on me. I looked up bus prices. But the price bracket of what I get shown has dropped, and I want things less often because of it.
I do know some people who love the targeting and like that Instagram finds their next purchase for them. If that is you, ignore everything I wrote here, but tell me what you end up buying. For the rest of us, here is one more small thing for the "don't" side of the list.