Targeted Advertising

Targeted advertising is a subset of advertising that focuses on reaching customers based on characteristics that line up with the product an advertiser is selling . These characteristics can be demographic: targeting race, gender, age, income, education, and/or employment; psychographic: targeting values, interests, personality, lifestyle, and/or opinions; or behavioral: targeting recent searches, purchases, clicked ads, or other online actions . Advertisers can use these characteristics through tracking consumers' behavior and data .

Advertisers are falling out of favor with untargeted ads such as billboards, print, and radio ads. Due to cheaper cost and higher return on investment, they have turned to more "relevant" targeted advertising . Targeted advertising falls heavily into the purview of surveillance capitalism and is one of the main drivers of the commodification of consumer data . The main draw is the elimination of wasted advertisements. The main agents are tracking based advertisements to advertise based on historical demographic and behavioral data that align with product demographics, and contextual advertisements, which involve matching product demographics to the content of the advertisement's host .

History

Surveillance Capitalism - surveillance capitalism -

Methodology

Using consumer data, online advertisers seek to define a profile for each user and deliver advertisements that suit their interests, particularly to counter the decline in clickthrough rate on online advertisements . These profiles are compiled and advertisements are delivered through three main methods: contextual targeting, re-marketing, and behavioral targeting.

Contextual Targeting

Contextual targeting aims to reach consumers by matching ads to the context of their locations, and ignores the profile of the user viewing the ad. For example, a car maintenance service running ads on a car blog or magazine, under the premise that viewers of this site own cars and would use their service; or a pet store running ads on a pet adoption clinic's website, under the premise that viewers of this site own pets or are soon to own pets. This method operates based on assumptions about user demographics based on the pages they visit .

Re-Marketing

Re-marketing is the lowest level strategy for using behavior tracking to make advertising choices. Advertisers target consumers who show very specific interest in a product or service, such as a user who started a credit card application then didn't finish it, or a user who habitually purchases a given product. These consumers can then be issued "re-marketing" ads, that exploit narrow signals by advertising for those products in which consumers have already shown particular interest .

Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting is the most pervasive and persistent method for targeted advertising. On any given page, it selects a "related" ad from a much larger catalog that could be shown to a consumer. "Relatedness" is based on the interest profile of the consumer, and computed by the advertising network (a company that connect advertisers to hosts). This method is more invasive than contextual targeting or remarketing, as it presents ads relative to long-term online behavior, rather than the current behavior or one instance of previous behavior. This data is additionally collected over a long period of time, and has been a source of controversy for users seeing ads related to them, but unrelated to the page they on which they see the ad .

Advantages and Disadvantages

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2187836.2187852

Controversy

Discrimination

Targeted advertisements have shown the capability to discriminate against the viewing user. In one example instance, ads related to housing, employment,and financial services have been found to target people of certain races. Advertisements as such violate anti-discrimination laws in the US.

(not a lot of writing but here's some good sources if u want!)

http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/speicher18a/speicher18a.pdf

http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/datta18a/datta18a.pdf

https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/stlulj63&div=9&id=&page=

https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/berkjemp40&div=5&id=&page=