“I don’t like it but that’s how it works”: Exploring Greek millennials’ perceptions of personalized advertising on Facebook and Instagram.

In the current digitalized era of social media, numerous companies choose to track and collect people’s data to display personalized advertising on social platforms based on consumers’ lifestyles and preferences. The usefulness of that practice lies in delivering consumers content that is relevant to their interests. Every day, a vast amount of consumers’ personal information (i.e. location, gender, and age) and browsing activity (i.e. websites visited, likes, and shares) are tracked to help companies promote their products and services successfully. Thus, personalized advertising and data tracking constitute forms of consumer surveillance. Of course, this practice directly affects consumers whose personal data is used by companies. Therefore, the aim of this research was to investigate Greek millennials’ perceptions of personalized advertising that they find on their Facebook and Instagram feeds. To obtain in-depth information of consumers’ knowledge, experiences, as well as feelings around personalized advertising and gain an explicit understanding of them, a qualitative method was used. In particular, 14 in-depth interviews were conducted with Greek millennials consumers. The transcripts were analyzed using the constructivist grounded theory approach and five overarching themes emerged from the findings. All these themes highlighted that consumers experience personalized advertising on social media in three different ways. Pleasant reactions occur when advertisements are close to consumers’ interests and preferences because marketers offer them useful and helpful content. Also, consumers respond positively to personalized advertisements because of their awareness that media creators/developments get paid by advertising. Contrarily, consumer annoyance occurs due to repetitive and misaligned personalized advertising. Besides, fearful reactions are expected because of online risks like hacking, and misuse of personal data. Consumers experience targeted advertising apathetically because they are knowledgeable of the data tracking mechanisms that companies use. As a result, they have compromised with the way the advertising system operates. Interestingly, privacy concerns were only raised due to highly personalized advertisements (i.e. based on private conversations) and it was perceived as invasive in people’s personal lives. Consequently, people have adopted a protective online behavior towards their personal data. They were also motivated to manage their privacy in two ways; by deciding under which circumstances they will self-disclose and by adopting privacy-preserving practices such as deleting cookies, and private navigation.