Personalized Retargeting and a Discussion of Privacy and Virtual Spaces
This piece was inspired in part by my own experience shopping for a cheap vacuum online, and some recent comments of a privacy conscious coworker regarding how uncomfortable and unhappy he was with the personalized retargeting ads he encountered on Facebook.
Adroll’s website describes the process of Facebook’s retargeting ads like this:
- Someone visits your site
- They leave without completing your desired action
- While browsing Facebook, they see and engage with your retargeted ads
- They click on the ad and return to your site to complete the desired action (Adroll)
This is the process that led me to be bombarded with ads for cheap vacuums after researching vacuum options at Wal-Mart (prior to going to a store to purchase one). I frequently encounter these extremely repetitive ads for products I researched for work, in addition to sites I’ve only visited once or twice, and may have only landed on by accident. Facebook doesn’t deserve all the blame however, as it isn’t the only site that uses this advertising method; although it’s one of the main places I’ve noticed retargeting ads. Advertisements targeted based on browser history are also sometimes called different things by different companies, for example Google’s version of this service is called remarketing (Google).
It’s unsurprising that this advertising method has become popular considering that consumers not only respond well to these advertisement, but these ads also influence buying behavior more often (50% self reported as influenced versus 12% for more traditional techniques) according to a recent survey from Sociomantic Labs (2013).
Yet there are many of us who find this type of advertising unnerving. I believe that retargeting ads that are run on Facebook and other social sites feel particularly intrusive or unwelcome because social media sites are considered personal spaces within the virtual realm (Orzan & Platon, 2012, p. 236). This is an interesting starting point for a discussion regarding what constitutes public and personal space on the internet, where it is hard to keep your data private and the majority of websites and applications are powered by advertisements. In the ever presence of advertising online, Catherine Tucker found that adding additional privacy controls, and thus giving users the perception of control over their data doubled the likeliness of user clicking on a targeted ad (2014, p. 546). Interestingly, untargeted ads performances were unaffected by the new privacy settings, but the more personal information was used to target an ad the larger the increase in effectiveness was once the privacy settings were added (Tucker, 2014, p. 546).
In my comic I imagine what the personalization and targeting of advertisements would look like if it applied to the real world. There are some examples of this that have already been around for decades, such as direct mail fliers that are targeted to a certain demographic or personalized based on past purchases (Higgins, 1986, p. 7). However I imagine a world in which the advertisements in storefronts, trailers proceeding movies, and even the overheard content of strangers conversations draw from the personal information that retargeting companies rely on. I also drew inspiration from Feed, a science fiction novel by M T Anderson. Feed is a futuristic novel where computers are implanted directly into the brain, allowing people to virtually chat to one another and interact with the internet simply by thinking. This world is an extreme example of consumer capitalism and private companies control almost every aspect of daily life. The feed joins the virtual and real by serving personalized advertisements based on physical inputs, such as a person looking at a store front. In my comic I wanted to eliminate the virtual aspect, relying on the reader to suspend the belief that physical objects appear the same to everyone. The idea behind the comic is that a specific subject is being bombarded with repetitive advertisements based on a specific item he expressed interest in within a store, not that the whole world is obsessed with this specific vacuum.
Throughout my comic I use a combination of advertisement formats that undoubtedly exist (ex: movie trailers, newspapers) but are not normally personalized, and formats that are currently fantasy (ex: product placement within the note of a loved one). My goals were to invade as many spheres of the subject’s life as possible, while drawing analogies to online formats. For example, the newspaper is intended to symbolize advertising within an informative or educational space, while the movie trailer represents advertising within entertainment, and the conversation between strangers is meant to be analogous to both unsolicited reviews from strangers (on sites like amazon) and testimonial claims the companies make that are not necessarily trustworthy.
As mentioned previously, Orzan and Planton concluded that ads within social, and thus personal, spaces on the internet are seen as intrusive (2012, p. 236). I hypothesize that these ads can come across as misleading as well, as they may appear like messages from friends or trusted sources when they’re inserted alongside such content, as they are on Facebook, Twitter and countless other social media sites. For this reason I included an advertisement in the form of a note from a loved one.
In an article in The New York Times, Jeff Chester, a privacy advocate and the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy was quoted saying “Retargeting has helped turn on the light bulb for consumers. It illustrates that there is a commercial surveillance system in place online that is sweeping in scope and raises privacy and civil liberties issues, too” (Helft and Vega 2010). Targeted and personalized ads may not be unnerving due only to their intrusive nature, but may also bring attention to the larger issues of surveillance and advertising within virtual spaces. This could explain why Higgens found that privacy settings increased subject’s reception of targeted ads. The privacy controls increased consumers perception of both their control over their information and their protection from surveillance.
Another aspect of targeted advertising is the inherent repetition. A recent meta-analysis found that a consumer’s recall of an advertisement increases linearly up to eight exposures and that the best consumer response is reached around the tenth exposure (Schmidt and Eisend, 2015, p. 1). Therefore, the level of repetition used by advertisers isn’t surprising. Personally I find it annoying, but depending on the situation it can result in deeper problems. For example, in the New York Times article, Retargeting Ads Follow Surfers to Other Sites, Julie Matlin mentions being “stalked” by a pair of shoes, but also goes on to discuss how persistent retargeting ads for diet pills not only creeped her out but also made her feel fat (Helft and Vega 2010).
The feeling of being stalked through virtual space becomes even more poignant when translated to the real world, especially for those who don’t take the internet seriously. I wanted to emphasize and solidify that feeling in my comic. The ending, in which the subject relents and purchases the vacuum in order to gain solace from the ads was meant to be humorous, but also to highlight the amount of pressure and anxiety ads may be able to produce when they are used to repetitively harass potential customers. I think the presence of such ads in personal spaces, which are normally deemed safe, intensifies the effect. Furthermore the purchase has the added irony of not causing the desired solace after all. Although companies may share and track information about potential consumers and the products they’ve shown an interest in, the actual purchase seems unlikely to be shared beyond the company you purchase from. For many commodity products that are widely available at a large number of retailers there is little hope of this personal information being used to stop targeting a subject once they take the desired action.
References
Adroll. (n.d.). Retargeting on Facebook. Retrieved from https://www.adroll.com/product/facebook
Anderson, M.T. Feed. 1st ed. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2004. Print.
Dunaway, G. (2010, Sept. 3). What’s So Creepy About Retargeting? Adotas. Retrieved from http://www.adotas.com/2010/09/what-so-creepy-about-retargeting/
Google. (n.d.). Use remarketing to reach past website visitors and app users. Retrieved from https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2453998?hl=en
Helft, M. & Vega, T. (2010, August 29). Retargeting Ads Follow Surfers to Other Sites. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/technology/30adstalk.html?_r=4&src=busln
Higgins, K. T. (1986). Personalized direct mail moves from novelty to standard. Marketing News, 20(14), 7.
New survey from sociomantic labs shows personalization dramatically improves digital advertising’s ability to influence and convert consumers. (2013). Marketwired, Retrieved from http://ezproxy-library.ocad.ca/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1450233173?
accountid=12991
Orzan, G., & Platon, O. (2012). Consumer Opinions Towards Online Marketing Communication And Advertising On Social Networks. Lex Et Scientia, 19(2), 236-244.
Schmidt, S., & Eisend, M. (2015). Advertising repetition: A meta-analysis on effective frequency in advertising. Journal of Advertising, 1-14. doi:10.1080/00913367.2015.1018460
Tucker, C. E. (2014). Social Networks, Personalized Advertising, and Privacy Controls. Journal Of Marketing Research (JMR), 51(5), 546-562. doi:10.1509/jmr.10.0355[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]