I'll take Occam's razor on this one. This is much better explained by people becoming more aware of something after having been exposed to it recently [1]. They

I'll take Occam's razor on this one. This is much better explained by people becoming more aware of something after having been exposed to it recently [1]. They talk about it with a friend, and suddenly the ad that usually goes under the radar now goes above the consciousness threshold. It connects to more neurons that usual, and thus makes a complete cycle in the brain. Furthermore, this is highly amplified by marketing tactics. Their friend would have been exposed to the same campaign, and this might be why he/she talked about it. This is the co-occurence that the second person actually reacts to. It knows the statistics are skewed on this one. Something is up. I would not be surprised if Facebook campaigns are rolled out clusters by clusters of friends. It takes repetition for consumers to remember a message, and this is an efficient way to create it. That's the nature of social ads. If anything, it informs us of the emergent phenomena that can arise in a social graph. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...