Dr. Yair Ben DavidThis headline is sure to cause a great deal of privacy anxiety in some of you, and in some of you it will be like: “Don’t they do it already”? But, to understand how effective, for better or worse, personal feature-based advertisements can be, read to the end
Today, as all us consumers feel, advertisers know a lot about us when they approach us with a marketing message. They know our gender and age environment, they know our language and area of residence, and even more, they even know our interests and hobbies. They didn’t have to make much effort to get that information, because we gave it to them voluntarily. We gave Facebook this information ourselves when we “liked” fashion-company pages (“interested in fashion”) or when we joined political groups (“politically active”); and in Google, when we browsed Google partner sites—for example, after browsing a few travel forums, Google labeled us (technically, by saving an identifying file, called a cookie, on our browser) as “travel enthusiasts”.
But even in a crowd of travel enthusiasts, you have to know how to approach each one in his own style; a travel enthusiast who is open to experience and adventure will prefer messages that offer excitement and new experiences, while a conservative traveler who leaves the house only when he is sure that everything is planned and organized, and maybe even just because everyone travels abroad once a year, will prefer a message that gives him a feeling of security. So, how can we find our personality traits on the Internet? And how can we tell whether customizing messages to our personality traits works? Well, many studies have examined this issue over the past decade, but one widely discussed study published in the important scientific journal PNAS examines these questions on a very large scale and has caused a change of view regarding personal trait-based advertising, both among researchers and business entities.
The study, published under the name “Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion”, examines how personality-based advertising affects surfers, using an unusual research tool in the research psychology landscape: Facebook’s advertisements system “Facebook ads”. The use of an advertising system as a research tool is still relatively new and rare, but given the significant exposure that large advertising systems have, and their precise demographic targeting ability, its use as a research tool seems to be increasing.
Users of the Facebook advertising system are still unable to perform personality-based advertising. Given public criticism of the social network regarding Facebook’s privacy retention, this won’t happen any time soon, either. However, surfers can be targeted by their interests, or by key pages they “like”, and these properties can easily be linked to personal attributes.
To learn about the surfers’ personality traits, researchers used both the ability to target surfers based on their “likes” and their general characteristics of behavior on Facebook, as well as the vast “My Personality” database. This is a database that includes information on millions of users who, at the time, used an app that downloads Facebook user characteristics to a huge database, and links that data with the answers to personal diagnostic questions that the user answered.
Many Facebook users, including me, used the app and answered the questionnaire to learn a little about themselves by their browsing features. This database allows, among other things, to find links between the personal data obtained from the questionnaires and the pages that the browsers liked and, according to this, to find the prominent personal characteristics of the browsers that liked each page—information that was very useful to the researchers in this study.
It’s important to emphasize that, following the Cambridge Analytica data scandal and its significant deterioration in privacy settings, it seems that such databases, which provide rich information to psychology researchers, will no longer exist.
The findings show to what extent the advertising message is customized to the user’s personality traits and can increase the percentage of advertisements clicks on Facebook, as well as the number of purchases. For example, when ads tailored to people with extroverted personalities and “openness to experience” were shown (for example, with a message like “Dance like no one’s watching, but they totally are”), they were far more effective for the extrovert and “open-to-experience” audience on Facebook (the pages they liked, etc.). Conversely, messages tailored to a more introverted audience, such as “Beauty doesn’t have to shout,” increased the percentage of clicks and sales among the audience identified by its characteristics as introverted.
If the big companies do use your personality traits to personalize advertisements to you, you probably won’t know it. Photo: Regis Duvignau / Reuters.
The surprising findings were the percentage of increase in the click-through rate, as well as the percentage of purchases following the customization of advertisements to personality traits. Customizing the message to the surfer’s personality traits increased the click-through percentage by 40% and the purchases by 50%. It is important to note that openness to experience and extraversion are personal qualities known for their prediction of behavior, and it is unclear whether advertising based on other personality traits would have such surprising and significant results.
This study, which was far more comprehensive than its predecessors in the field, generated a surge in examinations of how additional personality traits affect advertising, as well as significant advances in the field of personality-based advertising, which is far more common today than it was before the publication of this research.
The harsh criticism of the large advertisers’ intrusion into the privacy of the users has led to a change of policy and to companies actually refraining from bragging about how they target their advertising, as they used to. So, even if the big companies do use your personality traits to customize its advertisements to you, you probably won’t know it, and they will portray it as advertising by patterns of interests and the likes associated with those features (that, by the way, is how advertising agencies allow targeting different ethnic groups, by targeting areas of interest and residence typical of these groups), but if this advertising is indeed as effective as the studies show—your consumption as a result of the advertising will significantly increase, without your even noticing.
How do people make moral decisions? Do men and women have different moral systems? Why is it that, in many cases, our actions are different from our moral stand, and why do we expect others to behave differently from the way we expect ourselves to behave? And when will we rely on computers and robots to make moral decisions for us in advertisements for example?
Psychological research tries to provide answers to these questions. In my blog, I will share research in the field and try to tell, at least in part, the story of moral psychology in recent years.
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Yair Ben David is a researcher in the fields of developmental and moral psychology at Tel Aviv University.
