Voters Say They Are Wary of Ads Made Just for Them

Political campaigns may be able to show specific ads to specific voters online but they may want to tread lightly. The results of a new study to be released by professors at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania show that 86 percent of respondents did not want political campaigns to tailor ads to their interests. The results of the study come at a time when national and local political campaigns are steadily increasing their use of technology that traditional marketers use to tailor advertising. For political campaigns, the process is called microtargeting. Information about voters — like the charitable donations they make, the type of credit card they use and the Congressional district they live in — is combined with voter registration records, and the result allows campaigns to send certain types of messages to voters.