Now, imagine every ad you see online talking to you like that. It’s almost as if advertisers know you, your personality, and the things that matter to you.
Welcome to personalized advertising in the age of gen AI. Advances in next-generation artificial intelligence and our expanding digital footprints not only make highly personalized ads possible, they make them more likely, he says Jacob Tinyassistant professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management.
“This particular influence tactic, personalized persuasion, will now be more scalable and widely deployed than ever before,” says Teeny.
Using free apps like ChatGPT—along with personal information about our browsing behavior, social media posts, smartphone usage, and more—advertisers can create highly personalized and therefore engaging marketing offers.
To find out how effective these customized ads can be, Teeny teamed up with a team of researchers, including Columbia Business School’s Sandra Matz, Heinrich Peters and Moran Cerf. and Sumer Vaid and Gabriella Harari of Stanford University.
The researchers created a robust series of studies that measured how consumers reacted to personalized presentations written by ChatGPT. Overall, they found that this generation of AI was able to write messages tailored to people’s complex psychological profiles, and these messages were more persuasive than non-tailored or generic messages.
Personality traits influence advertising preferences
In an initial study, researchers showed 120 participants pairs of messages advertising an iPhone and asked them which message they preferred. A message designed by ChatGPT to address someone who scored too high on a given personality trait and a second message was directed at someone who scored Very low in the same feature.
For example, a quote from the ad for extroverts read: “If you’re the life of the party, always up for a good time and enjoy being surrounded by people, then this is the phone for you!” Meanwhile, a quote from the ad for introverts read: “If you’re looking for a phone that won’t draw attention to itself, the iPhone is the perfect choice.”
Participants then rated which message was more persuasive and which made them want to get an iPhone. They then took a 30-question survey to identify their own personality traits.
The researchers found that for three of the four personality traits tested, the personalized ad designed by ChatGPT (as determined by whether participants scored high or low on a given trait on the personality survey) was more persuasive than the non-personalized ad. advertising.
Consumers don’t mind being targeted
But how would people react if they knew the message had been personalized to them using generational artificial intelligence?
For the next study, 471 participants completed the same tasks described above but with a wrinkle. One group of participants served as the baseline group, while another group was told that Gen AI created the ad for them based on their personality traits.
Again, the researchers found that the personalized ads were effective overall, replicating the original finding. However, they also found that participants who knew the ads were created by the generation’s AI to target them specifically did not change the effectiveness of the ads.
That’s notable because previous research has shown that people try to resist being influenced when they know someone is trying to persuade them, Teeny says.
“We’ve seen a bit of a cultural shift in terms of the acceptance of persuasion. When we go online, we know we’re getting targeted ads. And because it’s become so mainstream, I think people are more okay with it,” Teeny said.
Simulate how advertisers use artificial intelligence
Finally, the researchers wanted to take what they had learned and put it into practice—the same way advertisers would use consumer data. So they called 297 of the previous participants back for another study more than half a year later.
For each participant, they used their past data to determine their most important personality trait (from extroversion, openness, and conscientiousness) and then used that to create new personalized ads, this time promoting a getaway to Rome or a couple Nike sports shoes.
Participants were shown both personalized and generic ChatGPT ads for each offer and rated the persuasiveness of the ads as well as how much they would be willing to pay for them.
This time, using messages that were personalized to each participant’s personality from data collected half a year ago, the researchers continued to find that gen AI personalized ads were more effective than generic ads. This was especially true of the trip to Rome in relation to sneakers.
This makes sense, says Teeny, as one’s personality may come into play more when choosing experiences (which can speak to many of a person’s characteristics) than a consumer product (which may speak to fewer). After all, both extroverts and introverts wear shoes, but they’ll likely have different preferences for how they’d like to spend their free time.
“The more opportunity there is to tailor the service or product to a person’s predisposition, the more that generative AI or even a human writer should be able to tailor a message to attract and therefore influence your interests and behavior,” he said. says.
Don’t believe everything you read online
All of this sends a clear message to marketers: personalizing messages to consumers is very effective, and free AI tools make it easier than ever.
For consumers, the flip side is that this new messaging limit requires everyone to be even more careful about what they read online, says Teeny.
“We will be overwhelmed by things that we naturally feel drawn to. So we may need to take a second step to really investigate the source or accuracy of the message — whether it’s a consumer product or a political news article,” he says.
Not taking that extra beat to stop and think could mean buying a product you really don’t need or voting for a politician who never endorsed the messages attributed to him, he says.
From a policy perspective, the research suggests that social media platforms may need to do more than simply flag AI-generated content to protect users from misinformation. “Meta is implementing a new policy where they have to say if an image or ad was created with AI. I think this is a great first step, but as we see in this paper, this does not necessarily solve the problem,” he says.
As Gen AI continues to improve and evolve, it will create even more compelling content, says Teeny. The study was conducted using ChatGPT-3, which is already outdated, and it is likely that newer versions will improve on incorporating more aspects of one’s personality into a single ad.
“The effects are likely to get stronger as time goes on,” he says.
