论文标题

探索小型,中和大型企业的在线微目标实践

Exploring the Online Micro-targeting Practices of Small, Medium, and Large Businesses

论文作者

Chouaki, Salim, Bouzenia, Islem, Goga, Oana, Roussillon, Beatrice

论文摘要

Facebook和其他广告平台通过允许广告商选择特定用户并定位它们来利用用户数据为营销目的(该实践称为微目标)。但是,诸如Cambridge Analytica之类的广告客户在选举的背景下使用这些定位功能恶意使用这些定位功能来操纵用户。欧洲委员会计划在《新欧洲民主行动计划法》中限制或禁止某些目标功能,以保护用户免受此类危害。困难是我们不知道这些限制对常规广告商的经济影响。在本文中,为了告知辩论,我们通过了解谁在Facebook上的广告以及他们如何使用目标功能迈出了第一步。为此,我们要求890个美国用户在其浏览器上安装一个监视工具,以收集他们在Facebook上收到的广告,以及有关这些广告的目标的信息。通过将Facebook上的广告客户与他们的LinkedIn个人资料匹配,我们可以看到71%的广告商是中小型企业,其中有200名员工或以下员工,他们负责61%的广告和57%的广告印象。关于微目标,我们发现只有32%的中小型企业和30%的大型企业微目标至少一个广告。这些结果不应被解释为微目标不是作为营销策略而有用的,而是广告商更喜欢将微目标任务外包给广告平台。实际上,Facebook正在采用优化算法来利用用户数据来决定哪些用户应该查看哪些广告。这意味着广告平台正在执行算法驱动的微目标。因此,在设定限制时,立法者应考虑传统的广告客户驱动的微目标以及广告平台执行的算法驱动的微目标。

Facebook and other advertising platforms exploit users data for marketing purposes by allowing advertisers to select specific users and target them (the practice is being called micro-targeting). However, advertisers such as Cambridge Analytica have maliciously used these targeting features to manipulate users in the context of elections. The European Commission plans to restrict or ban some targeting functionalities in the new European Democracy Action Plan act to protect users from such harms. The difficulty is that we do not know the economic impact of these restrictions on regular advertisers. In this paper, to inform the debate, we take a first step by understanding who is advertising on Facebook and how they use the targeting functionalities. For this, we asked 890 U.S. users to install a monitoring tool on their browsers to collect the ads they receive on Facebook and information about how these ads were targeted. By matching advertisers on Facebook with their LinkedIn profiles, we could see that 71% of advertisers are small and medium-sized businesses with 200 employees or less, and they are responsible for 61% of ads and 57% of ad impressions. Regarding micro-targeting, we found that only 32% of small and medium-sized businesses and 30% of large-sized businesses micro-target at least one of their ads. These results should not be interpreted as micro-targeting not being useful as a marketing strategy, but rather that advertisers prefer to outsource the micro-targeting task to ad platforms. Indeed, Facebook is employing optimization algorithms that exploit user data to decide which users should see what ads; which means ad platforms are performing an algorithmic-driven micro-targeting. Hence, when setting restrictions, legislators should take into account both the traditional advertiser-driven micro-targeting as well as algorithmic-driven micro-targeting performed by ad platforms.

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