Very few people that I know enjoy constantly interruptive advertisements. No wonder that for many years people have tried to rid the world of ads. Our grandparents and their parents, unfortunately, were not able to avoid ads. But during those years it was easy to distinguish what were ads and what were not.
When analogue television eventually came to South Africa in the 1970s, it was still easy to spot the interrupting ads. It was annoying, but to some extent tolerated since somebody had to pay for the free television. Luckily some clever entrepreneurs invented digital satellite television, which originally was sold as a paid service so there would be no ads. But lo and behold, it was not long before the annoying and interrupting ads found their way back to paid television.
Smart electronic engineers, however, developed the famous digital video recorder that allowed viewers to skip past commercials. Finally, it seemed to be the end of the annoying ads. All over the world people were elated because they succeeded in stopping the ads. Or so it seemed…
When the Internet was commercialised in the 1990s, and Tim Berners-Lee from CERN developed the World Wide Web, suddenly ads were back with annoying banners and pop-ups on the “free” internet. Again clever software engineers came to the rescue of users and developed the ad blocker, resulting in the successful blocking of ads on computers, phones and also tablets.
However, advertisers became smarter and advertising was adapted and disguised as news (advertorials in the legacy media and native ads in digital media). In both advertorials and native ads, they have made the wall between advertising and editorial departments porous, eliciting serious ethical questions.
All around the world people read news stories completely unaware they were reading ads.
But advertising evolved even further into sponsored content. Sponsored content is a form of promotional media that is paid for by the advertiser, but created and shared by another brand, influencer, or publisher. With the numerous influencers on social media, your friend or family member can now “be” the advertising targeting you as part of their core audience aligned with certain brands.
Despite all these efforts, online advertising sometimes was still a hit-or-miss business for no apparent reason. It could be that potential buyers just do not connect with a product in a way that motivates them to buy it. Often the reason is that the advertising is not addressed to the right audience, or the ads do not meet the viewer’s specific interests and aspirations.
This is why many advertisers have resorted to behavioural data and behavioural targeting to improve the relevance and effectiveness of online adverts. Behavioural targeting entails the segmentation of customers based on their interests and stage in the customer lifecycle.
Online shoppers are thus targeted with highly relevant information at the precise moment when they are the most likely to be converted into buyers. Behavioural advertising is thus much more than merely collecting user data. It is about understanding the customer and deriving appropriate inferences and has led to increased user engagement, ad click-throughs and improved shopper conversion rates. Behavioural targeting uses information about almost all online activities – clicks, searches, social media, what you have browsed and bought. Based on this information, relevant ads that will appeal to the users based on their unique online behaviour, are then selected.
This is one of the reasons why users of online media often get the sense that online advertisements know much more about them than they might expect. Users may even wonder why they see a certain ad and then realise later that they might actually be the kind of person who would buy the product.
This type of advertising does not show users the things that they have searched for and showed an interest in, but rather predicts what they might like based on their profile created from the tracking of online actions. Thus when you search for movie tickets, you might receive an ad for a specific restaurant.
The value of behavioural advertising thus lies in its predictive power. By creating a model that tracked purchases and predicted pregnancy status based on specific items (e.g., multivitamins, lotion and cotton balls) the retailer, Target, were able to know that a women is pregnant even before she has told her family.
The troublesome aspect is that research has found that these ads do much more than merely reflecting the past or even future preferences of online users. They can, in fact, change how people see themselves in fundamental ways. This is precisely why behavioural advertising is so effective. Some psychologists are of the opinion that the effectiveness can be ascribed to “labelling theory”. It is well-known in psychology that giving people a label can change their behaviour. It is thus possible that online users may change their self-perceptions to match the advertised information based on their unique online profile.
A simple example is that organisations seeking donations through online advertising, found that when a user is called “charitable” after making a donation, they are more likely to make a second donation than someone who is not called charitable after donating. People act consistently with who they believe they are, and labels from organisations and other people can thus shape their identity if it is based on accurate information.
Since behaviourally targeted ads act as implied social labels, research published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that receiving a behaviourally targeted ad can modify a person’s self-perception to match personality traits associated with the product in the ad. The ad, for instance, may be perceived as saying “you have sophisticated tastes”, which may lead to the consumer feeling more sophisticated.
But behaviourally targeted ads even go further. They do not only change how people view themselves, but also cause them to change their behaviour to be consistent with their amended self-perceptions.
Many of today’s online ads thus know exactly who we are, and are manipulating our behaviour to increase sales of a specific product or service. It is a lucrative multibillion-rand industry. This is why so many large technology companies eventually became ad networks.
Good examples are Facebook or Meta that originally was a social network connecting friends over the internet; Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube; Amazon, the large one-stop online store, and Microsoft and Apple the large information technology companies. They all have massive engaged audiences and large amounts of personal data for profiling, enabling them to charge high fees for behavioural advertising.
If the idea of behavioural influencing is disconcerting (and perhaps it should be) then the one solution to this problem would be to totally opt out of personalised and targeted advertising, which will take the consumer back to the old days of irrelevant advertising. A possible alternative would be to be more aware of and recognise behavioural targeting and the influence on a person’s self-identity and actions.
Professor Louis CH Fourie is an Extraordinary Professor University of the Western Cape
BUSINESS REPORT