It all started innocently enough. I was driving around with my spouse and I mentioned newly launched shopping site jet.com. Neither my spouse nor I had ever visited, and the name was met with a blank “what the heck is that? ” stare.

As most of you probably know, Jet.com is meant to be the amazon.com killer. Its valuation six months pre-launch was pegged at a somewhat astounding $600 million. The company has enjoyed what seemed to be a ton of press – much of it pretty negative. Robin Lewis in particular wrote a wildly critical piece on Forbes, in which he basically said the investors in jet were toking on some pretty sweet weed. Not my style, but the point was taken.

This led me to wonder: Jet is widely talked about among retail insiders… but how much does the general public really know?

I decided to take an informal poll among my eclectic mix of Facebook friends. For such a seemingly well-publicized venture, very few people had even heard of jet.com, and those who had heard of it were mostly part of the consulting or investment community. Those same “insiders ” I just mentioned – but more investment or tech analysts than actual retailers.

What are the specifics? Of 199 respondents, a total of 34 people had heard of jet. Only two of those thirty-four people had seen an ad for the site, others had read about it in various on-line publications. Approximately 20 of those people are part of the investment / consulting community. Respondents varied in age from their late 20’s (Millennials) to their 60’s (Boomers). In other words, it’s fair to say that among this respondent pool, across all age brackets and geographies very few consumers had heard of the service.

This prompted me to write a piece for Forbes about the poll and where I reported “You should be hearing about jet.com in various marketing campaigns soon. The company has dedicated its first $100 million for an outdoor ad campaign in eleven cities. Based on responses to my Facebook poll, they might want to raise that number quickly. “

When the poll was over, I posted a link to jet.com on my Facebook page and thanked everyone for participating. That’s when things got a little wonky.

I started getting private messages (PMs in Facebook parlance) saying things like “Look what I just got ” with a link to a jet.com banner ad. I personally had also visited the site, and even signed up for it. Ever since, I’ve been literally barraged with retargeting banner ads. Ironically, the most frequent place I’ve seen them is on Forbes, and also (incongruously) in the fitness app, myfitnesspal.com. No products offered, no description…just a big purple banner exhorting me to come “shop purple. “

It hit a fever pitch on Thursday when I received a PM from a former colleague and former director of Marketing at Voltari, Jeff Buddle. It’s important to note having worked for several digital marketing company, Jeff is not ignorant to the ways of advertisers. Excerpts follow:

“I went to Jet.com after you mentioned it and am now getting re-targeted ads every day. They’re straddling the line between smart marketing and irritating.

“I’d recommend (from my ad tech perspective) that they scale back impressions. And change their creative! It’s just a…banner ad. If you click through, it doesn’t explain anything…as far as I can tell you end up on their home page. And, “Shop Purple? ” I’m colorblind. I can’t see purple. “

Boom! There are so many lessons to learn here. I’m pretty mortified that I subjected a couple hundred people to a barrage of retargeting, and fascinated that no one checked to find out if purple was a good color. Sure it’s a signature color, but not if it looks gray. And Jeff had another good point. What exactly was the call to action in all those banner ads? Remember purple? We have stuff for you?

One thing I did learn is that Scott Friend, Founder of Profitlogic (now called Oracle Retail Markdown Optimization) is on the board of Jet. Scott’s an old friend and one of my first clients from my AMR days, and I’ve set up some time to speak with him. I have a couple of goals for the call. One is to understand how the pricing algorithms jet uses to determine order pricing will help them to become profitable. Another has become a need to understand the rationale behind all the re-targeting.

I have another thing I should probably do – and that’s to apologize to the 200 people who took my poll and might have visited Jet. And to let them know that it all winds down after a few days. It has for me. This morning I went to a travel web site to jog my memory on the name of a town I visited when I went to the Amazon rain forest in 2012. So now, “Shop Purple ” has been replaced by exhortations to visit the Amazon. As if. Once was enough of that!

Jeff’s message is really important. It’s important to modulate, moderate and have clear calls to action in our outreaches to consumers. The line between interesting and annoying is a fine one. Which side of the line is your company on?

Think about it this way….one reason Jet.com’s launch might have gone unnoticed is that the week before the site’s launch, Amazon.com held its first “Prime Day ” event. A clear call to action, it dominated social media and the popular press. It’s a Harvard Case Study in free marketing. Creativity is really important. We can ALL learn from that.