Ad optimization, at its core, was always about effectively persuading human emotion. Those consumer habits, according to new research from the Columbia Business School, can be traced right down to individual digital footprint, helping “people overcome their human limitations.”
In new research entitled “Psychological Targeting as an Effective Approach to Digital Mass Persuasion” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Assistant Professor of Business Management Sandra Matz’s team explores a new development in the idea of “personalized persuasion.” Thanks to the accessibility of our digital footprints, marketers can now tailor persuasive messages to a “person’s fundamental character traits and psychological needs.”
Professor Matz and her co-authors conducted three experiments in which they targeted over 3.5 million Facebook users based on “Likes,” then measured users’ reactions (i.e. “clicks” and “conversions”) to “persuasive appeals in the form of Facebook ads that either aligned with or ran counter to the users’ psychological profiles.”
In one experiment, the researchers customized online beauty retailer ads that targeted either introverts or extroverts, based on their unique Facebook Likes. The researchers found that “matching the content of persuasive messages to individuals’ psychological characteristics resulted in up to 40 percent more clicks and up to 50 percent more purchases than their mismatching or un-personalized messages.”
While psychological targeting certainly has many advantages when it comes to product positioning, it has the potential to be more insidious. On a more individual level, psychological targeting can easily be “used to exploit weaknesses in people’s character and persuade them to take action against their best interest,” such as Facebook users with psychological traits related to pathological or compulsive behaviors.
The authors actively embrace the numerous ethical questions that surround the application of psychological targeting:
“How do we as consumers and society at-large want to use this new technology? In what settings do we want to facilitate its application, and when do we want to restrict it? For which purposes should we use it, for which should we not? Under which agreements should we be allowed to implement it, and with which required degree of transparency?”