Just another ad?

Abstract: Marketers often target women because they represent over half of the population in Canada and Sweden and because they are the purchasing agents for 85% of household items. Advertisers and marketers use targeted marketing on Social Media platforms in the hopes of engaging the audience enough to initiate a purchasing action. For this paper the goal was to understand the relationship between women aged 55+ and their attitudes and perception of targeted advertising, to see whether it was effective in engaging them as consumers. Through interviews and the think-aloud method we found that while the overall perception of online advertising was negative, in practice, the ads on their social media feed were either accepted as relevant ads, simply ignored/not noticed, or not recognized as advertising. Finally we conclude that because social media gives users the impression that they are in control of the content on their feed, the consequences may be that targeted advertising can influence audience’s perception of who they are, more than they think.