How ethical is it for advertisers to target your mood? | Emily Bell | Opinion | The Gua... - 0 views
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The effectiveness of psychographic targeting is one bet being made by an increasing number of media companies when it comes to interrupting your viewing experience with advertising messages.
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“Across the board, articles that were in top emotional categories, such as love, sadness and fear, performed significantly better than articles that were not.”
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ESPN and USA Today are also using psychographic rather than demographic targeting to sell to advertisers, including in ESPN’s case, the decision to not show you advertising at all if your team is losing.
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Media companies using this technology claim it is now possible for the “mood” of the reader or viewer to be tracked in real time and the content of the advertising to be changed accordingly
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ads targeted at readers based on their predicted moods rather than their previous behaviour improved the click-through rate by 40%.
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Given that the average click through rate (the number of times anyone actually clicks on an ad) is about 0.4%, this number (in gross terms) is probably less impressive than it sounds.
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Cambridge Analytica, the company that misused Facebook data and, according to its own claims, helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, used psychographic segmentation.
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For many years “contextual” ads served by not very intelligent algorithms were the bane of digital editors’ lives. Improvements in machine learning should help eradicate the horrible business of showing insurance advertising to readers in the middle of an article about a devastating fire.
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The words “brand safety” are increasingly used by publishers when demonstrating products such as Project Feels. It is a way publishers can compete on micro-targeting with platforms such as Facebook and YouTube by pointing out that their targeting will not land you next to a conspiracy theory video about the dangers of chemtrails.
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the exploitation of psychographics is not limited to the responsible and transparent scientists at the NYT. While publishers were showing these shiny new tools to advertisers, Amazon was advertising for a managing editor for its surveillance doorbell, Ring, which contacts your device when someone is at your door. An editor for a doorbell, how is that going to work? In all kinds of perplexing ways according to the ad. It’s “an exciting new opportunity within Ring to manage a team of news editors who deliver breaking crime news alerts to our neighbours. This position is best suited for a candidate with experience and passion for journalism, crime reporting, and people management.” So if instead of thinking about crime articles inspiring fear and advertising doorbells in the middle of them, what if you took the fear that the surveillance-device-cum-doorbell inspires and layered a crime reporting newsroom on top of it to make sure the fear is properly engaging?
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The media has arguably already played an outsized role in making sure that people are irrationally scared, and now that practice is being strapped to the considerably more powerful engine of an Amazon product.
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This will not be the last surveillance-based newsroom we see. Almost any product that produces large data feeds can also produce its own “news”. Imagine the Fitbit newsroom or the managing editor for traffic reports from dashboard cams – anything that has a live data feed emanating from it, in the age of the Internet of Things, can produce news.