AI in Marketing – Curse or Blessing? : Impacts of Programmatic Advertising and Personalized Content on Society

Abstract: With the help of Programmatic Advertising and the resulting personalized content, consumers can be targeted precisely and with the help of Artificial Intelligence. The associated use of customer data creates ethical conflicts. Therefore, the research question is asked: How does Programmatic Advertising influence consumer's data security and diversity of opinion and what effect does this have on the further development of the technology? For the purpose of elaborating the research problem a literature analysis and expert interviews are carried out. The analysis shows that Programmatic Advertising has already taken up the majority of digital advertising activities. This results in advantages for advertisers, since consumers can be addressed in a targeted manner. Nevertheless, this provokes data law issues and the demand for more data security for the individual customer, which, among other things, is given more attention by big tech companies. Due to the constant change within this trend, new possibilities arise, such as contextual targeting, in order to continue to do an efficient display of advertising. Nonetheless, this work calls for more regulations to be able to give customers a better overview and control of their used data and to avoid restricted diversities of opinion, which can be promoted through microtargeting and therefore the addressed display of content. The prospects of Programmatic Advertising, however, are predicted with a steady increase because other areas within the media landscape will be pervaded by this technology in the future.