Is Ad Targeting Exploitation?
Throughout my undergraduate discipline in Advertising I was speedily made aware of the attached ethical dilemma of exploitation. By exploitation, I refer to the usage of one’s subset of personal information for strategic advertising placement to better sell products or widgets. As far as exploitation goes, this ethical dilemma refers to the exploitation of generalized demographic information — such as age, gender, race, and geographic region, along with what accompanying occupations, salaries, and expenditures are associated with those demographic criteria.
The reason why this is an ethical dilemma is not the usage of data (we agree to sharing our data whenever we search the internet without a VPN blocker or access Facebook, Instagram, etc.). The ethical dilemma then, is the usage of consumer data to make generalized assumptions about peoples’ livelihood without incorporating psychographic goals and behaviors or a realistic journey for how a person goes about their day, along with how media touch points are naturally consumed.
This negligence of individual consumer goals is a sizable issue with the current state of modern advertising — often solely utilizing demographic informed data and further promoting advertising that poorly involves.
But with producers paying web publishers large sums of money to drive storyless, ill-informed content only adapt for demographic information, the rate of actual engagement is tiny. The advertiser mentality for this sort of content then is to push out more advertising to increase likelihood of views, a poor practice that does not encourage engagement or brand recognition for money spent.
The other day I was reading an article about public perceptions of Facebook advertising. The article brought to light the issue being faced by those populations that inhabit lower socio-economic regions experiencing demographic exploitation because they were only being advertised products that were cheaper, knock-off, and low end. The interviewee in the article went on to state that her own perception of these advertisements made her furious with those brands being advertised to her because she felt as if they knew they could hunt her down because of her assumed financial situation. Viewing these ads she reported feeling uninspired, stuck, and less likely to buy these products as result of feeling targeted.
The primary role of ad targeting is to deliver content with higher likelihood of purchase conversion to those most likely to convert. It makes sense that the selling of an expensive new watch would be of greater value to the ad’s producer if it were put in front of people with the criteria verifying likelihood of purchase. But when it comes to less-economically-sound populations that are far less likely to pull out their wallets for expendable goods, demographic exploitation thrives with a non-empathetic understanding of goals by brands and advertisers alike.
