Targeted Perceptions: Experiences and responses to social media advertising by Digital Natives

Over the years, mobile marketing has grown rapidly. With the existing knowledge that mobile marketing yields a high revenue, marketers want to master this art. A crucial way to approach this is effectively targeting the group that is most relevant on the platforms this group is the most active on. For many companies, targeting a group often referred to as Digital Natives is key, as this generation is said to have grown up with smartphones and other digital communications and technologies that enable marketers to use collected consumer data to reach them in the online environment. Using this consumer data, businesses can now reach users by targeting them based on what they know about these users, showing them ads that are more relevant to their interests and preferences. This practice results in different consumer reactions and perceptions, including perceived privacy risks that have not yet been studied in-depth. By conducting in-depth interviews and carrying out a qualitative analysis on the collected data, this thesis provides meaningful insights in the perceptions and experiences of Digital Natives that are exposed to targeted advertisements on social media, answering the following research question: How do Digital Natives perceive targeted advertising on social media? The interviews focus on the social medium Instagram, as this is the platform the studied cohort is the most active on. The grounded theory approach to data analysis, including three coding stages, yielded four overarching themes that help grasping the perceptions and experiences of the studied Digital Natives: Accepting targeting & valuing convenience, in which positive attitudes towards targeting and data collection are expressed; Instagram as a mysterious, powerful consumer influencer, in which Instagram is seen as an entity that knows things about participants, influences them and confuses them about the way in which it gets to know them; Attempting to hold onto consumer power and agency, in which participants show awareness of data collection and targeting, actively engage in protecting data, believe that Instagram does not and cannot know them as a person, feel resistant to ads and express criticism and negativity towards advertising and targeting; Low trust in Instagram, data collection & targeting, containing expressed general informational privacy concerns, skepticism towards data collection and protection efforts and uncertainty expressed by the studied Digital Natives regarding their own actions. The four themes encompass different observed patterns that, during the interviews, often offset each other; these themes and their respective nuances help comprehending the different, contradictory perceptions and experiences reported by the studied Digital Natives.