to be fair could this not be any app on his phone that is listening?
I assume that the big ad aggregators like google etc. would be up for integrating with anyone who provided testably good data, and also it may be that the system is being gamed from the other end.. where hints are passed to the ad bidding bot (of the dog toy company) to pay more for your attention.
its a pretty crappy state of affairs we have.. its a shame that our media (and so much of everything) is owned by so few - it makes it very hard to fight against any of this :( no one has any interest in actually fixing this or making big changes as they are all using it to power their growth and so their delusional valuations.
There was nothing more depressing than working as a BA for a big company and realising that every metric was openly being gamed, objectives were stupid and impossible to meet - but it didn't matter as so long as they kept a constant suite of major structural change projects on the go (buying companies, moving profits and ownership over boarders etc.) they could meet all of their targets and just keep the lies going.
The lower level staff had to play along as their managers would fire them if they didn't play the game. the managers had to keep to the line to maintain their promoted state and keep moving up.. the most senior management could just believe the numbers and fire a middle manager if they didn't like what they got. and the shareholders didn't care as if the targets are hit the share-price just keeps rising and rising.
There was no case i could make to do anything about this, I think i proved the issue to several people but there was no way of people doing anything about it without damaging their own lot :(
Since then I have had much more understanding with the broken nature of the world, how long it will take to fix and how sometimes (often) you really do just need to let the wheels come off before there will be any action - as by that point people are less worried about being blamed and are more likely to act.