The BigFive _ targeted ads

The Big Five and Targeted Advertisements

The Big 5

Openness to experience / openmindedness

: likes to try new things, cultured, likes to be intellectual and play w/ ideas, broad interests

: facets - intellectual curiosity, aesthetic sensitivity, creative imagination

Conscientiousness 

: orderly, organized, dutiful

: facets - organization, productiveness, responsibility

Extraversion

: positive emotions, social, outgoing, assertive

: facets - sociability, assertiveness, energy level

Agreeableness

: nice, cooperative, kind

: facets - compassion, respectfulness,trust

Neuroticism/Negative Emotionality

: negative emotion, anxious, irritable, worrying

: facets – anxiety, depression, emotional volatility

 

Internal Validity

-   how tightly controlled a study is

-   increased by random assignment to condition

External Validity

-   how well the results of a study apply to the real world

-   increased by using a large, diverse, representative sample

-   increased by having the conditions of the study closely approximate the real world / real life

Internal vs. External validity Tradeoff

Psychological Targeting TED Talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkI_TrPmKgA

Psychological Targeting : What Your Digital Footprints Reveal About You _ by Sandra Matz

Psychological Targeting

: creating ads or other persuasive messages with the goal of influencing people with certain personality traits

- Are ads that match people’s personalities ( using the big five ) more affective than ads that do not match?

- Tested by creating targeted ads and putting them on Facebook and other social media

- Big samples : over 3,000,000 saw extraversion ads, over 84,000 saw the openness ads

Computing Extraversion based on likes

: selected 10 likes with highest average extraversion score and 10 likes with lowest average extraversion score

Targeted Ads : extraversion class data

- because makeup is used more often by women, the researchers only targeted women with these ads

Targeted Ads : extraversion results

- women who saw ads that matched their personalities 1.5 times more likely to make a purchase from the website than women who saw ads that did not match their personalities

Computing Openness based on likes

: Selected 10 likes with highest average openness score and 10 likes with lowest average openness score

Targeted Ads : openness class data

Targeted Ads : openness results

- people low in openness installed the app more when it was targeted to their personality.

- no effect for Ps high in openness ( the version of the ad they saw was not related to whether they installed the app )

Critiques of the Study

1. no random assignment to ad condition – there could be other differences between the groups

2. Researchers should compare ads not based on personality at all ( rather than mistargeted ones ) to targeted ads to determine their effectiveness

3. Researchers should have tested how creative the different ads were judged to be

4. The DV should be click rates ( because installing the app or buying a product are affected by what people see after they click and are a less pure measure )

Questions

1. In what ways does this study use the classical psychological approach ?

2. In what ways does this study use the big data approach ?