Advertisements "For You"
In the modern-day, the topic of digital tracking has come to the forefront of privacy concerns for consumers. Everyone has experienced searching once for an item and being bombarded with related advertisements for the next week. All being said, this is a relatively simple tool advertisers use to predict consumers’ interests. Browsers and sites report what a consumer has shown interest in and ads are presented based on those reports. Of course, the thought of a site tracking your purchase and searches are alarming to most consumers. As privacy concerns mount, some corporations are acting to help consumers such as Apple which has disabled tracking on their devices. Actions such as this severely hurt the traditional model of digital advertising and the businesses involved such as Facebook are scrambling to find an alternative to the literal tracking of consumer interests. Marketing firms will need a new tool in order to target ads specifically to consumers upon whom they are likely to be effective.
The answer for these advertising companies lies in the app TikTok. Since its inception, users of the app have been amazed and confounded by the app’s ability to predict what content a user will like and be interested in. A recent WSJ Investigation found that although TikTok has stated the app uses a variety of factors to show content such as likes, shares, and followings there was one factor that trumped the rest. According to the WSJ, the app seemed to monitor what videos a user would hesitate to scroll on or would continue to watch to the end. Based on these subtle cues, the apps create a profile of what each user’s interests are. The app’s continued popularity speaks for itself in terms of the power of a successful algorithm.
There is one consumer retail company that has previously used some version of a predictive algorithm related to consumer purchases. Just like Netflix predicts what shows a user may be interested in, Amazon predicts what items a user is likely to purchase. Estimates have shown that 35% of purchases on Amazon are from algorithm predictions. Amazon has even utilized these algorithms to stock their fulfillment centers, products are shifted around so that they are closer to consumers who are likely to purchase them. Amazon’s algorithm still follows the “traditional” model in the sense it uses hard data about a consumer’s past purchases and searches to predict future purchases. If a TikTok style algorithm was implemented where a site constantly tracked time spent looking at items, a new predictive algorithm could be developed that picks up on the smallest sues from the human mind and exploits them with repeated advertisements. As more device-based corporations, such as Apple and Samsung, act against the traditional ad model in the name of privacy, a new style of algorithms will emerge which can potentially introduce a more dangerous form of advertising.
As privacy concerns lead to the death of conventional digital tracking, the rise of predictive algorithms related to consumer purchasing may create a more dangerous digital world in which algorithms cater super-effectively to user interests.
