Annenberg School professor examines personalized marketing practices in new book

Increased personalization in marketing could be driving people apart, Penn professor Joseph Turow warns in his latest book.

Turow, a professor emeritus at the Annenberg School for Communication, published “The Problem With Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age” earlier this year. He examined the use of personal information in marketing and considered how artificial intelligence tools could change future practices in the field.

In an interview, Turow explained that AI use in extreme personalization could make “make community and society harder to bring together” because it is increasingly challenging for people to understand and communicate with one another.

He also noted the consequences of publicly available data on a personal level. 

Companies and marketers can “literally envelop you in a monopod” if they have access to “hundreds of pieces of information about you,” according to Turow. He added that down the line, it could even lead to phenomena such as articles having different headlines because analysts “know you’ll click with more positive compared to negative headlines.” 

Turow highlighted a phenomenon he called “digital resignation,” through which people “throw up their hands and say, ‘There’s nothing I can do about it’” when faced with the scope of companies’ knowledge.

“What’s more and more prevalent in society is a sense of resignation about how this takes place — and companies encourage that,” he added. “They encourage a kind of seductiveness” where people give up their data “even when it’s opt in, not just opt out.”

Turow’s publication comes after he led a 2023 Annenberg School study on public awareness of how companies use personal data. At the time, he found that of over 2,000 participants given a true-or-false survey about consumer data security, only 23% received a passing grade and just one single respondent received an “A.”

According to his research, 74% of Americans were resigned about data in 2023, up from 58% in 2015. He also found that nearly 80% of Americans believed that it was urgent for Congress to pass legislation regarding data privacy and protections. 

AI is becoming increasingly prevalent on campus. The Wharton School announced that its students would have access to Claude Enterprise late in August, and Penn Information Systems & Computing expanded access to the platform across the University on Sept. 7. 

In July, Penn also announced that it would begin piloting PennChat, a secure portal offering students access to various Claude and ChatGPT models. The models are unable to access the Internet and are only trained on data provided before specified cutoff dates.