Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment. The Last Show with David Cooper. Do you ever get the feeling that the internet knows you a little bit too well? It's not just recommending things, it's lurking, watching you, connecting the dots, and then suddenly serving you ads that feel a bit too psychic for your comfort? Researchers call that feeling creepiness.
And do consumers like it? Do you like it? Let's dig into that with someone who's researched this area.
Chapter 2: What makes digital targeting feel creepy to consumers?
He's a marketing professor at the University of Bern in Switzerland, and his name is Harley Cromer. Harley, welcome in. Thanks for joining me.
Yeah, hello David, thanks for having me.
Let's start with a very relatable moment. I search for something once, maybe it's sneakers, and then suddenly the internet is following me around, offering me targeted sneakers ads, and it starts to feel a little bit odd. How often does this happen to people online?
Well, it's happened all the time. And I think that feeling that we observe with many brands, many consumers is exactly what drew us in. So I think a lot of people had such moments and now with digitization and AI even more so. So the brands, they personalize their ads and we think, wait, how did they know that?
And we felt that the marketers and the researchers talked a lot about privacy and personalization. But no one really understood what's the actual emotional experience that people have when they feel something's creepy. And we wanted to understand what makes that feeling happen, how it unfolds, and what does it do to the brand.
So we wanted to take a closer look, a deep dive, to really understand what is creepiness.
So what happens when a company tries to give me, quote, helpful personalization, and then it crosses into the, okay, that's creepy territory? What happens to me in my mind?
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Chapter 3: How do consumers typically react to targeted ads?
We wanted to understand how the emotion itself evolves, but we also wanted to understand the consequences, potential negative consequences for the brand. And we found that can be quite problematic, that consumers feel like... someone is stalking me, it's intrusive, and there's a reactance towards the brand. So if you feel creepy, you feel something is odd, something is wrong here.
And we found also in our research that, well, this can have negative implications for the brand, that people have negative feelings towards the brands as a consequence, and may even avoid the brand. So on the one hand, we have positive benefits of personalization, You talk, your vacuum cleaner doesn't work anymore. And then you get personalized ads from Dyson, for example.
So there's a potential benefit that you say, oh, great, now I can watch the ad. But on the other hand, people feel, oh, that's creepy. And maybe then they move on and transfer this negative feeling towards the brand and don't even buy it. So there's a trade-off, positive and negative. aspects. And so far, everyone, the researchers have tried to understand the positive aspects.
And we said, let's take a look at the dark side of it. What are the risks, basically?
And does it depend more on how I perceive it? For example, if I'm typing to someone about a vacuum that broke and then I receive a targeted ad and I don't put two and two together, I'm like, great, I want that. But if I put two and two together and I feel surveilled, then it's got a negative impact. So is it more about me than it is the fact that this technology exists at all?
Well, I think that's something so far researchers didn't fully understand it. What's the intra-psychic process? And that's what we wanted to understand. And we did several studies and experiments to better understand what's the actual process in the mind of a consumer. Because it is invasive. And then how does the emotion of creepiness actually occur?
And we better understand the actual occurrence. How does it evolve the emotion? Then marketers could also say, what could they do that it doesn't feel creepy anymore? So that's what we also to understand. On the one hand, you want to personalize, but how can you avoid that is perceived as creepy? What could you do? That's something we try to find out.
So walk me through some of these findings, some of these experiments in this territory.
Yeah, great. Maybe we can just start with the first study. There we used a student example of nearly 500 students and we showed them different kinds of scenarios where there's this digital personalization. Ads basically highly... personalized, and then we controlled for two control conditions.
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Chapter 4: What emotional experiences do consumers have with creepy ads?
Basically, there was transparency in one intervention. They said, okay, we are basically surveilling you. It was quite transparent that it is personalized. It was transparent to the consumer. The second intervention, they said, we have good intentions by ensuring the good intentions. A third intention was to give a discount, a lower price. We individualize this and you get a discount.
Another one was a monetary compensation. We say, well, we personalize it and you get some money back. And then was positive emotional cue. We said, and the idea was because we followed up on Taliban, There were Taliban fighters who were shown pictures with their Kalashnikovs and kittens. And it's also a bit creepy to see those fighters.
And we basically said, okay, maybe we should also introduce such a positive emotional cue like kitten pictures while they have this individualized ad. And the final one was a charitable donation message. We say we give some funding for charitable donation. And it was quite interesting. The main finding, so basically none of these interventions changed the initial appraisal, that it is ambiguous.
But the people still had the creepy reaction at first. So that was very hard to undo. But only two interventions really worked that it didn't feel so creepy afterwards to offer money and the emotional cues. But still it felt creepy, but it didn't result in reactance. So we thought brands could individualize and at the same time use emotions.
This hides the fact that it doesn't have so much, still a little bit creepy, but it doesn't feel, doesn't have such negative consequences.
So there are certain interventions to make this feel less creepy. I suppose kittens are involved in one, but is it not acting creepy? Isn't that the goal here? Or is it just to get away with it for companies?
Yeah, I think basically the companies want to individualize so they can better sell basically, because that's the point. If you as a consumer receive the ad that really has a benefit for you, and that's certainly personalized, overall, even though it's a little bit creepy, you would still buy it. That's basically our message.
If you personalize, it gets a little bit creepy, but if you use emotions, then you can still sell. And that's the final goal in marketing, to sell.
Well, I don't know how I feel about that as a consumer, but it's good information to have for sellers. And I think it really digs into why we feel creepy when we get these targeted ads. Harley Cromer is a marketing professor at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Harley, it's been fun chatting with you. Thank you for joining me.
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Chapter 5: What are the negative consequences of perceived creepiness for brands?
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