Hello all! I hope that your month has been going well. Year’s almost over! With that in mind, I have an interesting article for you guys today about microtargeting, and how effective it being “micro” actually is.
As of now, microtargeting has been seen as a robust strategy in convincing the minority. Increasingly, political institutions and private companies alike use this as a way to communicate with a select group and maximize their profits in these groups.
Microtargeting means using data to find and focus on the kinds of people we want to reach. It’s about knowing our audience so well that we can come up with a message tailored just for them. When we talk about microtargeting, we’re not only segmenting or grouping people together but also thinking about how to concatenate different groups of people and message across those segments.
The Statistics of the Study, the study just mentioned, carried out by a research team from MIT, performed a number of experiments to explore how microtargeting influences consumer behavior and political preferences. Their findings are somewhat surprising. They suggest that microtargeting is not as powerful a tool as many believe when it comes to changing the opinions or deeply held beliefs of individuals.
Opinion changes were minimal: Being shown microtargeted ads resulted in a 0.5% increase in opinion change—virtually indistinguishable from zero—when compared to a group of participants who weren’t shown such ads. When it came to political campaigns, the effect of microtargeting on support for a particular candidate was about the same as if you flipped a coin: 0.7% shift in support, not enough to make any campaign manager happy.
What microtargeting did do, however, was strengthen predefined beliefs. That’s something I found really interesting, how the amount of participants that were shown ads of their political part reported even more engagement, a starkly different response than that of the status quo.
Higher engagement and click-through rates: Microtargeted ads resulted in higher engagement rates, with participants more likely to click on them compared with non-targeted ads. The click-through rate for microtargeted ads was 2.3% higher than for non-targeted ads, indicating that they better captured attention within specific segments.
Microtargeting’s Subtleties study statistics shine a light on the sometimes-overlooked limitations of microtargeting as a method for changing minds. If anything, the work serves as a reminder that, while microtargeting may not be all it’s cracked up to be when it comes to persuasion, it is surely a force to be reckoned with when it comes to the kinds of attention it can capture and the kinds of existing beliefs it can reinforce.
What stood out to me were the diminishing factors of microtargeting. Namely, the usage of echo chambers and filter bubbles. If you didn’t know, filter bubbles are algorithms that show you content based on what they feel like matches your interests, while echo chambers are what they sound like, feedback loops that give you content you have liked in the past. What this study showed is that people don’t like to be targeted out in a random ad break, and as a result of that these algorithms actually did more harm than good.
The study’s statistics stimulate significant conversations concerning the ethics of microtargeting. Even though this promotional strategy can serve to bolster both engagement and revenue, the tailored nature of the ads can render them almost hypnotically persuasive. Indeed, a prominent researcher in the field has referred to this type of advertising as “the attention life raft in the sea of engagement.” However, if we think of all the ways in which ads can and do persuade us, and of all the ad we don’t see, but only because we’re not the target audience, the ethical issues surrounding the conduct of such a persuasive enterprise become rather stark.
For responsible use of microtargeting, policymakers, platforms, and advertisers must implement safeguards and transparency measures. They must also ensure collection of pertinent data, and that the data is used responsibly and ethically, in conjunction with protective algorithms. To work best, these measures and rules must be enforced by necessary authorities and complied with by all involved.
To conclude, microtargeting is a powerful tool in the digital marketer’s arsenal that can also work well in politics. However, the form this method takes can be quite different from most people’s understanding of it. Microtargeting, on the most fundamental level, is about finding and sending the right message to the right person. In the hands of a benign sender, this is a strategy that could be harnessed to great effect in the service of virtue. Its use is currently an ethical gray area, though, and that makes it an area of responsible concern for anyone who might want to either benefit from or be protected against its possibility of harm. Personally, I understand the merits of microtargeting, and with these fascinating finds, I believe that there is still a fair and ethical usage currently of this process.
References:
https://news.mit.edu/2023/study-microtargeting-politics-tailored-ads-0621
cognitivecents.com 
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