Imagine you’re scrolling through social media on your phone one night and the ads start to look very familiar. It’s decorated in your favorite colors, features your favorite music, and the wording sounds like phrases you often use.
Welcome to the future of advertising, which is already here thanks to AI.
For example, advertising firm Cheil UK has been working with startup Spotlight to use large-scale linguistic AI models to understand people’s online activities and adapt its content based on how the AI interprets a person’s personality.
The technology can reflect someone’s tone, phrasing, and pace of speech and change the text of an ad accordingly, or insert music or colors based on whether the AI determines that person is an introvert or an extrovert, or whether they have certain preferences for loud or quiet music, bright or dark colors, and more.
The goal is to show millions of different ads to millions of people, all of which are unique.
Retail, consumer electronics, packaged goods, automotive, insurance, and banking brands are already using this technology to create AI-enhanced, personality-driven ads that target online shoppers.
This AI can read what people post on public platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and other public forums, someone’s search history, and most importantly, what people type into ChatGPT.
The AI then overlays its inferences about a person’s personality onto what advertisers already know about people. For example, brands can already see information through platforms like Facebook and Google, such as what part of the country they live in, what age group they are in, whether they have children or not, what their hobbies are, where they go on vacation, and what clothes they like to wear.
That’s why the jeans you were searching for online magically appear as a sponsored ad in your inbox, or the vacation you were searching for seems to follow you around the internet.
Chris Camacho says AI advertising will discover and exploit your emotional state [Cheil]
The difference is that, thanks to the information the AI reads about you, it can now determine your personality and change the content of those ads. It targets individual people rather than demographic segments or personas traditionally used by advertisers.
Chris Camacho, CEO of Cheil UK, said: “This is a shift from data collected based on gender and age, and information that is readily available, to going to a deeper emotional and psychological level.”
“We now have AI systems that can penetrate and explore your entire digital footprint, your entire online persona from your social media interests to what you’ve been working on.
“That level goes much deeper than before, and that’s when you start building a complete picture of understanding the person, whether they’re happy or sad or what personal circumstances they’re going through.”
A further advantage for advertisers is that they may not even need a bespoke AI system to personalize the output.
US researchers studied consumers’ reactions to iPhone promotions using customized text created by ChatGPT based on how high the person scored on a list of four different personality attributes.
The study found that personalized text was more persuasive than ads without personalized text, and people didn’t care that it was written by AI.
“Right now, AI is very good at the targeting part. It’s still in its infancy, but the personalization part is where brands are actually creating creative copy that matches elements of the user’s psychological profile,” explains Jacob Teeny, assistant professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, who led the AI research.
“There is still room for development, but all roads point to the fact that this is the way to go.” [digital advertising is done]” he added.
Personalized AI advertising could also offer a solution to the problem of digital advertising “waste” – the fact that 15% of the money brands spend on digital advertising goes unseen or unnoticed, and therefore doesn’t create any value for the business.
Alex Calder warns ads could be ‘creepy and vulgar’ [Alex Calder]
Not everyone is convinced that personalization is the right way to go.
“Congratulations, your AI has spent a lot of money creating an ad that only one person will see, and they’ve already forgotten about it,” says Alex Calder, chief consultant at Brighton-based AI innovation consultancy Jagged Edge. The company is part of the digital marketing company Anything is Possible.
“The real opportunity lies in using AI to deepen the relevance of powerful, mass-reaching ideas, rather than fragmenting them into one-to-one micro-ads that no one remembers. The creepy vulgarity of bragging about knowing your personal details is still vulgar.”
Ivan Mato of brand consulting firm Elmwood agrees. He also questions whether people will accept it, whether regulators will allow it, and even whether brands should want to operate that way.
“There’s also the issue of surveillance. It all relies on a data economy that many consumers are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with,” says Mato, who is based in London.
“AI opens up new creative possibilities, but the real strategic question isn’t whether brands can personalize everything; it’s whether they should, and what they risk losing by doing so.”
“Should brands personalize everything?” asks Ivan Mato [Elmwood]
Personalized advertising through AI could also take a dark turn, admits Cheil UK’s Camacho.
“There will be a camp that will use AI successfully in an ethical way, and there will be a camp that will use AI to persuade, influence, and guide people down the right path,” he says.
“And that’s the part that I personally find very scary, when you think about elections and political campaigns and how the use of AI will impact voting decisions and who gets elected next.
But Camacho is committed to staying on the right side of ethics.
“We don’t need to use AI to make ads creepy or to make individuals act unethically. We’re trying to stay on the better side. We’re trying to strengthen the connection between brands and individuals. That’s all we’ve ever done.”
