Personalized Ads Are Irritating Consumers, Research Shows

Advertising has become increasingly personalize over the course of the past few years. This is something that has become a bit of a problem because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up requiring users to give up more of their data than they might be initially comfortable with. These days, cross device personalization has become the name of the game. This is the process by which consumers will receive personalized ads based on all of the devices that they use rather than just a single device.

It seems that customers aren’t just unsatisfied with these types of ads, they’re downright creeped out by them. This is according to research conducted by CheetahDigital which revealed that around 54% of consumers find personalized ads creepy. This might be due to the reason that they feel like this level of personalization is an infringement of their privacy. The percentages are even higher for other questions that were asked during the research. Cross device ads were found to be creepy by 66% of respondents, but it seems that consumers are most creeped out by ads that use their location since 72% of respondents agreed that this was something that they did not like at all.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that consumers are aware of the potential benefits of personalized ads. 50% of consumers said that they felt like personalized ads helped them discover products and services that were truly useful for them. However, regardless of how useful such a thing might be, consumers might find the creepiness factor outweighs any potential benefits that such a thing could end up providing to them.

This can be seen with the number of consumers that felt like the ads were invasive. 44% of consumers said that this was the case, a number that is a little too high to ignore. The main problem here is that a lot of companies have become somewhat reliant on personalized ads. This can be seen in the general outcry surrounding Apple’s new policy which made users opt out of app tracking by default, thereby making it necessary for them to opt in in order for the apps to obtain the necessary data from them.

It is essential for these companies to realize that customers are just not comfortable with ads that seem a little too personalized. Hence, it might become necessary for these companies to start looking into alternatives that would be a bit more palatable to the average consumer and would not cause them any problems in the long run.


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