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INTRODUCTION
Many call the US a democracy: a system of government where anybody can hold a position of power and the people can deliberate and enact legislation, or choose governing officials to do so. Supporting and maintaining a democracy typically requires free elections, shared cultures, trust in authority, and active citizens. The recent rise of consumer monitoring and data collection in this new digital age and the wealth of easily-accessible personal information to advertisers has created a pathway to widespread manipulation and separation. The result is an onslaught of targeted advertisements that are, at their worst, discriminatory and, at their best, limiting. Targeted advertisements have emphasized people being consumers rather than active, educated citizens, which threatens democracy; the examination of advertising throughout history and its transition to a digital space makes this clear.
THE RISE OF ADVERTISING
While there is evidence of advertisements as early as 3000 BCE in the Middle East, advertising took off with the spread of the printing press. While printing dates back to the second century CE in China, it wasn’t prominent in the West until the fifteenth century. Before then, few people actually knew how to read and write. The printing press created and distributed written work quickly, and with this new accessibility, reading and writing became more common skills.
The first printed, English-language advertisement was made in 1477 by London printer William Caxton, promoting his prayer book. The Christian Church, tradespeople, and medicinal producers all began to use printed advertisements. Advertising became even more common with the introduction of the newspaper in the sixteenth century.
William Caxton's advertisement
Historian Richard Hofstadter asserted that “one of the first concerted and sustained advertising campaigns in the history of the modern world” was the English entrepreneurs’ effort to attract settlers to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They printed brochures, books, and posters with the goal of encouraging people in England to move to the New World. America was portrayed as a place with endless resources: gold, silver, game, and limitless, free land that was basically up for grabs. Ads painted the New World as a kind of Utopia. By the mid-1600s, men outnumbered women six to one, prompting a targeted effort to attract women to early American settlements. Some advertisers addressed women directly, while other companies and promoters declared that men in America could essentially buy wives.
"Historian Richard Hofstadter asserted that “one of the first concerted and sustained advertising campaigns in the history of the modern world” was the English entrepreneurs’ effort to attract settlers to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. "
Advertising came to America with the European colonists, but wasn’t as prominent as it was in Europe. This was largely because settlers lived predominantly in rural settlements, with most people spending their time farming, growing their own food. Employers often paid workers in room and board, so there wasn’t always much money to spare. Additionally, printing equipment was not abundant in the New World at that time. But as more of this equipment arrived and Newspapers were started, advertising picked up.
In the 1800s, because of industrialization and mass production, advertising had become a profession. Communication was easier than ever thanks to postal routes, telegraphs, typewriters, and telephones, manufacturers were using railroads to distribute goods well beyond their local regions, and the advertising industry expanded as goods became more affordable and a culture of consumption emerged in the United States.
MASS MEDIA
The rise of mass media completely reshaped the advertising industry. Radio advertising began in 1922, right around when radio broadcasting was growing more widespread. The first recognized ad on the radio was for an apartment building in New York state; AT&T had sold the opportunity to have a brand or product mentioned on air. Ads by an oil company and American Express followed shortly after. On July 1st, 1941, the first television ad ran, right before a game between the then-Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. It was an ad for Bulova Watches, and cost about nine dollars, lasted ten seconds, and reached about 4,000 people in New York. By the late 1950s, television was the leading national advertising medium. Radios and TVs made it possible for ads to reach larger audiences in a wider range of places.
First television ad
DIGITAL ADVERTISEMENTS
With the rise of the Internet in the late 1980s and 1990s, much of everyday life transitioned to an online format: news outlets, banking, shopping, even sending letters. Communication became easier, and the spread of information could happen in an instant.
Sites like Google allowed for a new wealth of information and easy answers accessed through a few words typed in a search bar. “For advertisers, one of the key advantages of the Internet is that Web sites can be targeted to the very specific information needs of narrowly defined consumer demographic segments” (Sivulka 392). Google launched two programs based on this idea: AdWords in 2000, and AdSense in 2003. AdWords helps businesses to reach a targeted audience by displaying the business’s chosen text or images to specific users when those users use specific key words or phrases in their searches. These businesses only pay when consumers interact with the ad. AdSense enables publishers to offer paid advertising space on their platforms. This program will match the publisher with ads based on content and visitors, and the publisher will make money off of the advertisements. Both programs rely on data related to individuals’ activity and profiles, such as age, location, and gender, as well as recent searches and purchases. The Internet makes this information accessible.
"The Internet has provided companies with the tools to personalize the online experience for consumers, showing them only what the businesses decide each individual will react best to."
An article from the Journal of Information Policy on political manipulation and Internet advertising infrastructure states that "Digital ad infrastructure provides three key interlocking communication capacities. The first is the capacity to use consumer monitoring to develop detailed consumer profiles. The second is the capacity to target highly segmented audiences with strategic messaging across devices and contexts. The third is the capacity to automate and optimize tactical elements of influence campaigns'' (Crain and Nadler).
Advertisers spend time determining the audience that will be most responsive to the advertised product, and then are able to access data that will allow them to single out these ideal individuals and send them targeted ads. One article advising best practices in building up a marketing strategy suggests that "If you generally consider your audience to be fairly broad—Millennials living in mid- to large-sized cities—you may need to focus on a smaller niche, like single millennials between 28 and 35 living in the 20 largest metro areas who bought a sedan in the last five years and are now looking for an SUV. The pool of potential consumers may shrink, but ideally your ad resonates with more of them" (Atai).
The Internet has provided companies with the tools to personalize the online experience for consumers, showing them only what the businesses decide each individual will react best to. And for many people, this has resulted in a more enjoyable relationship with the digital world. But it is important to evaluate the risks that come with this extreme personalization.
HARMS AND SOLUTIONS
When people are shown only certain advertisements tailored specifically toward them, they are limited and disadvantaged. Seeing some ads and not others may not seem harmful, but the results of advertisers choosing their audience based on aspects of those individuals’ identity can be discriminatory.
In 2022, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, faced a lawsuit against its targeting algorithm for housing advertisements, which violated the Fair Housing Act. The United States Department of Justice alleged that “Meta’s ad delivery system uses machine-learning algorithms that rely in part on FHA-protected characteristics — such as race, national origin and sex — to help determine which subset of an advertiser’s targeted audience will actually receive a housing ad” (Justice Department Secures Groundbreaking Settlement Agreement…). In this example, certain people received ads for specific housing opportunities, while others did not. These advertisers have the power and the discretion to pick their audience, without considering any of the subsequent harms. And, clearly, there can be harms.
The other issue with targeted advertising is the massive amount of personal data used to reach each advertiser’s target audience. The collection of this information is not inherently bad, but many experts worry about what could be accomplished if the data was used in harmful ways, beyond simply promoting products. A journal article titled Psychological Targeting as an Effective Approach to Digital Mass Persuasion stated “In fact, recent media reports suggest that one of the 2016 US presidential campaigns used psychological profiles of millions of US citizens to suppress their votes and keep them away from the ballots on election day. The veracity of this news story is uncertain. However, it illustrates clearly how psychological mass persuasion could be abused to manipulate people to behave in ways that are neither in their best interests nor in the best interest of society” (Matz et al. 12717). This is just one of many examples of how the data used for targeted advertisements could be misused. Additionally, because advertisers see better results when their ads are targeted, there is an incentive to continue collecting data and develop systems to gather even more information than what’s used today.
These examples represent real concerns, but many feel that personalized advertising makes for a more enjoyable online experience, because people are seeing media that they’re likely to already be interested in. This is not something people would necessarily want to give up. “Consumers face an important dilemma between enjoying the benefits of personalization and being concerned about the privacy of their personal information” (Sutanto et al.). There are settings on most devices that restrict different aspects of personal data collection: turning off location tracking, stopping data from being shared across platforms, etc. But until the misuse of this information becomes a more pressing issue, it is unlikely that most people will sacrifice their customized online experience.
The onslaught of advertisements encourages people to be consumers first, and citizens second. Consumers care about themselves and their own needs first, while citizens typically have a broader range of concerns, such as the good of the country as a whole. Because ads have contributed to creating and maintaining a consumer mindset within people, the general public increasingly focuses on personal gain. The consumer mindset is about obtaining and holding onto things that benefit the consumer as an individual, and if targeted advertisements seem beneficial, consumers will hold onto those as well, feeding into a cycle. Essentially, The United States’ culture of advertising has created a society of people who cannot refuse these harmful ads, threatening democracy by tipping the balance of citizens versus consumers.
"The onslaught of advertisements encourages people to be consumers first, and citizens second."
WORKS CITED
Atai, Ameneh. “How to build a resilient marketing strategy and make the case to keep your budget.” Nielsen, September 2022, https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2022/how-to-build-a-resilient-marketing-strategy-and-make-the-case-to-keep-your-budget/. Accessed 19 April 2023.
Crain, Matthew, and Anthony Nadler. “Political Manipulation and Internet Advertising Infrastructure.” Journal of Information Policy, vol. 9, 2019, pp. 370-410. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5325/jinfopoli.9.2019.0370. Accessed 14 March 2023.
“Justice Department Secures Groundbreaking Settlement Agreement with Meta Platforms, Formerly Known as Facebook, to Resolve Allegations of Discriminatory Advertising.” Department of Justice, 21 June 2022, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-secures-groundbreaking-settlement-agreement-meta-platforms-formerly-known. Accessed 20 April 2023.
Matz, S. C., et al. Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion. 114 ed., vol. 48, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. JSTOR, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1710966114. Accessed 15 March 2023.
Sivulka, Juliann. Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes: A Cultural History of American Advertising. Cengage Learning, 2011. Accessed 18 April 2023.
Sutanto, Juliana, et al. “Addressing the Personalization-Privacy Paradox: An Empirical Assessment from a Field Experiment on Smartphone Users.” MIS Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4, 2013, pp. 1141-64. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43825785. Accessed 16 March 2023.
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