Facebook knows my university

[TonyB]

Very recently I was targeted by Facebook for an ad that got me intrigued.  This ad was for a hoodie and the hoodie being shown had my age as well as my university.  This leads me to believe that there is a technique for pulling in parts of someone's profile and dynamically creating an ad for them.

Unfortunately, google is failing me and I cannot find the name nor the details of this technique.  

What is this technique called?  How can I also do this?

[Leon_Henry2]

Hi Tony Leon from the community,

With google this marekting technique  cannot be achived as each person would need to be cookied with different data "a bit intrusive"

if you know the age  then you can  display it when they land on the page not before

You could retarget  a generic ad say "you are between X and X" and put visitors in that bucket

[TonyB]

This was a facebook ad (not Google) -- they are doing this but I'm not sure how....

[Tony_McCreath]

In Facebook ads you can taget people by their demographics, such as age, where you studdied, many things from a users profile. So they could create ads specifically for graduates of a university who are a specific age. 

Google's demographic data is no where near as complete or targettable. There is limited tragetting for age ranges, male/female and interests. 

[TonyB]

Tony, I know that is certainly one way to do it but it seems like a very large undertaking to do this type of thing for every single sizeable university out there.  I was thinking (hoping) there was some programmatic way this was possible where they are pulling out my age & university and dynamicaly generating the ad.

[Tony_McCreath]

It looks like Facebook has an API that would enable programatic control of your ads:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-apis