I like ads.

I do — and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

(How much do I like ads? I briefly considered opening this post with “Hi. My name is Josh, and I’m an adaholic,” but then decided to avoid the stigma of addiction. Denial, right?)

Sure, during the Super Bowl, I prefer the ads to the game — who doesn’t? (Admittedly, live-blogging the Super Bowl ads did draw some odd stares from the folks I was “watching the game” with. It’s now become something of a running gag whenever I’m over at a friend’s place.)

But here’s the real measure: I own a TiVo, and sometimes I don’t hit the Easter-egged “Skip 30 Seconds” button when an ad comes on. In fact, every now and then I even rewind to watch one again.

And I’ve been perfectly OK with the agreement Google and I made long ago: Yes, Google Gods, you may scan the megabytes of information stored in my free Gmail account and target the adjacent ads accordingly. Sometimes, I even click on those — a few of them actually do match my interests — and no doubt I do so more often than I would if the ads were randomized.

But, in general, behavioral targeting and (especially) the mining of my social graph kinda skeeves me out. (Yes, Facebook, I mean you. I don’t care if we named you a Rising Star last year. Star or not, you’re going supernova all over my civil liberties, and I’m this close to canceling my account and leaving you and all your 450 million members behind.)

With all this in mind, you can imagine my reaction to a banner ad I spied on The New York Times’ Web site this morning. “Advertising Is Creepy,” indeed.

More after the jump.

The sponsor of the ad doesn’t immediately announce itself, and the counterintuitive message (“Ads are creepy, but you’re reading this one.”) draws the eye, as does the black-and-red propaganda-poster feel.

The ad dynamically activates when the Web-site visitor hovers over the spot.

A Saul Bass–esque hand reaches up from below and grabs onto an innocuous (and, I admit, previously overlooked) little ring, pausing for a moment to let the viewer get her bearings before drawing down what amounts to a window shade.

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The shade reveals the ad’s message — and its sponsor, the “IAB” (or, as the logo puts it, “iab.” — with both the period and the dot of the “i” emblazoned in red).

ADVERTISING IS CREEPY!

Or at least that’s what you might think based on the fact that advertisers are trying to show you ads based on what they know about you. But the information they’re using isn’t personally identifiable. We have a lot of materials and a place for discussion about advertising and data privacy back on our site, and if that sort of thing interests you, we’d love it if you’d click and help spark the conversation. Thank you!

“IAB” stands for “Interactive Advertising Bureau” — not that you’d know that, of course. The ad never says so, nor does the landing page it takes you to when you click through, nor does the home page when you trim back that URL to www.iab.net. You have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of that page for the copyright notice.

On its “About” page, the IAB explains its mission, misuses the word “comprise,” and recursively suggests you click back to itself for more information:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 375 leading media and technology companies who are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising. Founded in 1996, the IAB is headquartered in New York City with a Public Policy office in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.iab.net.

The page also happens to serve up (or at least did when I visited) another version of the “Advertising Is Creepy” campaign — which is actually called the “Privacy Matters” campaign, by the way, and which was officially launched in December 2009 as the IAB’s first-ever consumer-education effort.

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You can see all three concepts for the Privacy Matters campaign here.

(That’s how I discovered the original ad that caught my attention when it seemed static actually had a dynamic element to begin with — that portion ran while I had the tab in the background. It’s very cool, and only heightens the echoes of Saul Bass.)

Anyway.

All this to say that I’m probably not even the — ahem — target audience for this campaign. I love ads, occasionally even enjoy them as “content” — and yet I still have reservations about what the advertisers do and don’t know about me, through my voluntary and involuntary participation.

I can only imagine what the general public will think when it cottons onto the, yes, creepy reality that diving into social media only multiplies — exponentially — the information that could conceivably be taken advantage of.

The fact that the IAB feels the need to conduct this campaign — and that the government has begun considering tightened restrictions on how companies and advertisers use consumers’ information — is evidence of that.

(For more on the subject, see Editorial Assistant Juan Martinez’s piece in our May 2010 print edition — in subscribers’ hands now, and available online here (Nxtbook digital) and here (our Web site). We also had an in-depth look at behavioral targeting (“Oh, Behave!”) back in January 2008.)

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