The Curated Consumer: How Americans Train Their Own Ads

Most Americans figure the data companies collect about them is out of their hands. Pew Research Center found that 73% feel they have little or no control over what personal data companies collect. A majority have stopped behaving that way. They search for a product twice on purpose. They open a competitor's website to see what happens next. They are curating their advertising the same way they curate a feed.

Targeting used to run largely on what you clicked. Increasingly it runs on what AI predicts you will want, inferred from behavior that was never a click at all. Americans have noticed: 64% already know AI helps decide which advertisements they see, though only around half of them say they understand how it works.

To understand what that's producing, Vibe.co, a performance-driven TV advertising platform, surveyed 1,000 American adults, from Gen Z to Boomers, who use ad-supported websites, apps, social platforms or streaming services. The survey asked what they do to shape the ads they see, and how they feel when the targeting lands. The sharpest line in the results isn't between generations, or platforms, or privacy hawks and everyone else. It's between people who can see their own fingerprints on an ad and people who can't. Shown the same well-aimed ad, one group sees a system that finally understands them. The other sees one that knows too much.

Key Takeaways

Americans Are Training Their Own Ads

After years of scrolling, Americans have gotten fluent in algorithms. They understand that recommendations follow from behavior, and that ads are just recommendations with a budget behind them. So they've started feeding the system on purpose.

In the past 12 months, 84% of Americans did at least one thing to influence what advertisers put in front of them. What stands out is where the effort goes. The tactics at the top of the list are barely tactics at all — comparing a few sites, searching a second time, watching a review — while the controls built for the job sit at the bottom. Only 13% changed their advertising settings. People are shaping their ads through the way they browse, not through the tools handed to them for it.

The tactics worked, at least by their users' own reckoning: 48% of those who tried them said their ads became more relevant, and 54% said the same ad started following them across platforms, turning up in a feed and again on a TV screen.

Curators — the respondents who say they act on purpose — do all of this more, and more intentionally. They were nearly three times as likely to have changed their advertising or personalization settings (20% vs. 7%), and considerably more likely to have engaged with social content about a topic (46% vs. 28%) or visited a competitor's website (41% vs. 29%). Curators aren't doing anything exotic. They're doing ordinary things on purpose.

Your Phone Isn't Listening. Most Americans Think It Is.

There's a specific kind of unease that comes from seeing an ad for something you talked about but never typed. 81% of Americans say it happens at least sometimes, and 42% say it happens often — often enough to stop feeling like coincidence.

Most have already settled on an explanation. 70% say these ads could be their phone listening, including 31% who say it definitely is. Only 7% doubt it.

The real explanation is less cinematic, and more impressive. Ad systems don't need audio, because behavior predicts better than conversation does. A platform can see what you searched last week, which pages you lingered on, what the other devices on your Wi-Fi are shopping for, and where your phone has physically been. Then there's the frequency illusion: once something is on your mind, you finally notice the ads you'd been scrolling past all month.

The ad didn't hear the conversation. It saw everything that led up to it.

How people react depends almost entirely on who they are. Among those who've had it happen, 23% found the ad convenient and the same share (23%) were impressed by its accuracy. Another 27% were simply curious how the advertiser knew. But 31% felt watched, 27% were uncomfortable, and 9% said it made them distrust the brand that served it.

Generation is the most visible fault line. 54% of Gen Z say they often get ads for things they only discussed, against 45% of Millennials, 40% of Gen X, and 26% of Boomers. And when it happens, 34% of Gen Z are impressed, compared with 15% of Gen X and 7% of Boomers.

But age is standing in for something else. 64% of Americans already know AI helps decide which ads they see, including 34% who say they understand how it works. Among curators, 51% find AI-driven recommendations useful, nearly double the 27% of non-curators. That isn't naivety: 51% of curators are still concerned about how their information is used, only seven points below non-curators at 58%. Understanding the mechanism and worrying about it turn out to be entirely compatible.

Where Targeted Ads Are Welcome

People have long been familiar with targeted ads. They search for a product or service online, and the results page has both sponsored and organic answers. So it makes sense that 55% of people are comfortable with targeted search engine results. But the television screen is where it meets the least resistance of anywhere tested. Traditional TV drew the lowest discomfort of all eight platforms, at 13%, in large part because its advertising is matched to the channel and the programming rather than to the individual viewer. It never announced that it knows anything about you, because it largely doesn't.

Streaming is where that welcome meets genuinely personal targeting. Comfort sits at 47% across all viewers and reaches 61% among curators, against 36% of non-curators. The people most engaged with their own advertising are markedly at ease on the streaming screen.

Social feeds are where friction concentrates. They drew the most discomfort of any platform tested, at 24%, and non-curators object most sharply of all: 33% are uncomfortable with personalized advertising in a social feed.

Curators were more comfortable with targeted ads on every platform, by wide margins — 69% on search results, 61% on streaming, and 60% on social feeds. Wherever the advertising reaches them, the people who had a hand in shaping it are the ones who welcome it.

Where an ad appears matters. It just matters less than who's watching it.

Better Ads, Better Purchases

Trust ran positive overall: 35% said that knowing their own activity had shaped an ad increased their trust in it, against 16% who said it decreased. Another 37% felt no different, and 11% had never realized their activity was shaping their ads at all.

Curators sit above those baselines on every outcome measured. They were more than twice as likely to say traceability increased their trust (53% vs. 20%). They reported higher satisfaction (77% vs. 69%), nearly double the repurchase rate from the same advertiser (38% vs. 21%), and a far higher rate of recommending what they bought (44% vs. 26%).

A caution on reading that: this study can't establish that curating causes satisfaction. What it does establish is that the two travel together, and that the likeliest mechanism connecting them is legibility. When people can trace an ad back to something they did, they read it as a system working for them rather than one working on them.

That tracing is the advertiser's job to make possible. It was never the consumer's job to work at.

The Price of Going Ad-Free

Nobody enjoys an ad break. But people understand the trade-off behind it. Ads are what keep a service free, or cheap enough to fit into the monthly budget. Most Americans have decided that's a deal worth taking.

Plenty of Americans spent the year pushing back on advertising. 45% skipped or ignored irrelevant ads, 29% ran an ad blocker, 28% closed a site or app over the sheer volume of ads, and 27% hid ads to see fewer like them. But only 16% paid for an ad-free tier.

Given the choice between money and commercials, most take the commercials. For movies and TV, 64% prefer some form of ad-supported option — a limited ad-tier (25%), a free service with more ads (26%), or ads tailored to their interests (13%) — against 28% who said they would pay more to remove them. That said, what people say they want runs well ahead of what they actually do: 28% say they would pay for a no-ads tier, but only 16% actually paid for one in the past year.

What This Means for Advertisers

The uncomfortable part for the ad industry is that the audience most receptive to targeting is the one teaching it what to do. And it can't be bought as a line item. Curators surface when someone has had enough interaction with advertising to recognize their own hand in it.

The people least comfortable with targeting aren't opposed to advertising. They still watch ad-supported services, still buy things they first saw in ads, and say they're satisfied with those purchases. What separates them from curators is a habit, not a worldview.

Three things to follow from the data:

Make the logic visible. Traceability more than doubles trust — 53% among curators who could tell their activity shaped an ad, against 20% of non-curators. And the appetite for control is specific: asked about data brokers, only 11% are comfortable simply because the ads are more relevant, but 21% are comfortable if they can see and control what information is used and 24% if their identity isn't attached to it. Transparency and anonymity each buy roughly twice as much acceptance as relevance alone.

Account for the venue. Advertising tied to a viewer's own activity draws 19% discomfort on streaming against 24% in a social feed — and just 13% on traditional television, where that targeting is rarely personal in the first place. Channel choice isn't only a reach decision; it sets the emotional baseline before the creative does anything at all.

Stop reading privacy concerns as a rejection. Half of curators are worried about how their data is used, and they are the most receptive audience in this study. Concern and receptivity coexist. Campaigns built on the assumption that a privacy-conscious consumer is a lost one are writing off the most valuable segment in the market.

Nobody is abandoning ad-supported media. Given the actual choice between paying more and sitting through commercials, people took the commercials, and they did it in every category tested. They'd just like to know how the ad found them.

Methodology

Vibe surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults via Pollfish who currently use ad-supported websites, search engines, social media platforms, video platforms, mobile apps, or streaming TV services, screened to exclude non-users of ad-supported media. The survey measured active ad-shaping behaviors, purchase outcomes tied to advertising, trust in targeted ads, comfort across eight platform types, reactions to overly accurate or "overshoot" targeting, awareness and reactions to AI-driven personalization, and preferences around ad volume versus ad relevance. Results were analyzed across demographic segments including generation and curator status. Curator status was defined among respondents who took at least one ad-shaping action in Q1: "curators" usually or sometimes did so on purpose (Q2), while "non-curators" took the same actions but realized only afterward, for reasons unrelated to shaping their ads, or were unsure of their intent. Percentages reflect self-reported data and may sum to more than 100% when multiple selections were allowed.

About Vibe

Vibe is a performance-driven TV advertising platform that lets businesses of any size launch connected TV campaigns across hundreds of premium channels, with audience targeting and AI-assisted creative built in. More than 12,000 brands have run campaigns on the platform, which became part of Walmart Connect in August 2026. Vibe's advertisers reach viewers on the same screens this research asked about, which gives the company a direct interest in understanding when targeted advertising earns its welcome.

Fair Use Statement

The findings and graphics on this page are available for non-commercial use. If you share them, please attribute Vibe and include a link back to this page so readers can review the comprehensive research and methodology.