It seems that the creepier advertising gets the more useful it becomes. I like it that Amazon knows my purchase history and can send me notices of price reductions on products I might actually buy. But there's an uncanny valley of my friend's facebook pictures appearing on sites that have nothing to do with facebook.
What usually bothers me about The Future of Advertising stories is that the author seems to starts by thinking "I hate advertising, so how can I make a story with evil and destructive advertising" (exaggerating to make a point) rather than "based on technological trends, I wonder what advertising will be like in the future." The problem with the former approach is that it produces advertising technologies that I find unbelievable. They are too expensive and impractical, because the author's first concern is making them harmful, rather than making them effective. I think the zombie ads in this story sort of fall into this category. It seems like they would be incredibly expensive and people can simply not open their doors for them. But the story undermines my knee-jerk distaste in that the ads are operating without any guidance, so I don't know how they would actually behave. I would expect an ad that knows enough about a potential customer that it can morph into a copy of the customer's dead husband to also know what the customer is likely to be interested in buying. It would most likely be selling medicine or gardening tools. Ads in most stories that sell viagra or fastfood do so because if they sold specials on science fiction books or computer accessories it undermines the author's desire to present them as bad things. But again these ads were operating on their own, so who knows what they would do.
I also found the characterization of the MC to be a little bland. I thought her situation was interesting, but I didn't feel the impact of her reactions for some reason.
On the previous week's podcast Mur presented this story as one about the future of corporate America*, but I don't think it is. It's not even about advertising. It's about a woman coping with loneliness. And it's not particularly American. Other countries have corporations and advertising. I'm guessing this story took place in the former US, but it could have taken place anywhere. As has been alluded to above, anyone who implies that the United States has a monopoly on powerful corporations or intrusive advertising has never been to Japan.