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Advertising is key to the business model of many online services. Personalization aims to make ads more relevant for users and more effective for advertisers. However, relatively few studies into user attitudes towards personalized ads are available. We present a San Francisco Bay Area survey (N=296) and in-depth interviews (N=24) with teens and adults. People are divided and often either (strongly) agreed or disagreed about utility or invasiveness of personalized ads and associated data collection. Mobile ads were reported to be less relevant than those on desktop. Participants explained ad personalization based on their personal previous behaviors and guesses about demographic targeting. We describe both metrics improvements as well as opportunities for improving online advertising by focusing on positive ad interactions reported by our participants, such as personalization focused not just on product categories but specific brands and styles, awareness of life events, and situations in which ads were useful or even inspirational.
O'Donnell et al. (Mon,) studied this question.