Everybody knows the situation where you are scrolling on social media and at a certain point you encounter an advertisement of a product that you were thinking of the last few days. After that moment you start thinking, how could this happen? I encountered a similar situation recently, when I was hearing a lot lately about a certain brand of home perfume sticks I received an advertisement of the exact product. Without even realizing searching for it. Snapchat describes the phenomenon of personal advertising as: “the practice of creating and delivering advertisements to specific individuals or groups based on their unique characteristics, preferences and behaviors” (Snapchat, 2023).

In personalized advertising, AI is being used to match advertisements to the characteristics and behaviors mentioned by snapchat. Not only snapchat, but also social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok use algorithms in combination with personalized advertising. Using AI while matching advertisements can be beneficial for both parties on the platform: the users and the advertiser. The advertiser has a bigger chance of reaching the right audience, thanks to the algorithm. And the user has a bigger chance of seeing an advertisement that is more appealing to him/her.

Although there are a lot of benefits using algorithms for delivering advertisements to the right consumers, there are also concerns. The major concerns are about privacy and data breaches (Raitaluoto, 2023). These big social media platforms deal with immense amounts of data that are stored on huge servers. If these servers get hacked, data of millions of users are in danger. Businesses have to keep track of these dangers and not underestimate the attention they should pay to data security. Another danger of personalized advertising is that customers may feel uneasy when they are targeted and feel that they are getting tracked (Kokemuller, 2017). This might result in them not using the platform anymore.

All in all personalized advertising has a lot of benefits to advertising businesses. However, social media platforms need to keep paying attention to potential security threats and need to protect their customers’ data.

Kokemuller, N. (2017, November 21). Definition of transparency advertising. Small Business – Chron.com. https://smallbusiness.chron.com/definition-transparency-advertising-35939.html
Raitaluoto, T. (2023). The benefits and challenges of implementing personalized marketing. Market Tailor. https://www.markettailor.io/blog/benefits-and-challenges-of-implementing-personalized-marketing#:~:text=Privacy%20concerns%20and%20the%20risk,time%2C%20resources%2C%20and%20technology.
Snapchat. (2023). Personalized Advertising – How it works and how to do it (2023) | Snapchat for business. https://forbusiness.snapchat.com/blog/personalized-advertising

Tommy Liu 531253tl, 1 October 2023

I was at the end of my first masters program in Marketing Management when Chatgpt gained a lot of popularity. A lot of courses were not able to adapt and it was very easy to use Chatgpt as a supportive tool to help answer quiz questions for some courses. However it was quick to realize that the outputs given out of Chatgpt, were not always correct. This started the process for myself to train, giving Chatgpt the correct inputs to gain the best outputs possible. Even Though it is artificial intelligence, the process felt like you were talking to a person who can only give you the right answers when asked the correct questions. During the months after the first usage, the knowledge of how to use Chatgpt became better, and I was able to adapt. Boundaries for Chatgpt were that it was not that good at giving opinions and if you ask something borderline illegal, it made sure it does not give answers that can break the law.

Besides using Chatgpt for education, I used the tool also for other different things. For example as a stock investor, I tried to use Chatgpt to maybe write a trading or investing strategy for me. However, quickly the flaws of Chatgpt came through and it is of course not possible to make-up a 100% profitable investing strategy. This is when I realized Chatgpt is more of a supportive tool than an active decision making tool.

Lastly there are also dangers with Chatgpt that I encountered. When starting my current internship I was working on some Excel documents. I was planning to insert a table with data, to ask if it could give me python prompts to run for valuable analysis. However, I discussed this with a colleague, explaining why this is not allowed in the company. Chatgpt gets trained by all the inputs it gathers, if you put company specific data into the program, it is able to use this data for other users. Which is ofcourse not what a big corporation wants.

All in all, I encountered a lot of situations with Chatgpt and learned the useful parts and the parts that you have to be careful of. Use Chatgpt, but use it supportive and wisely!