Consumer Perception of The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Advertising along the customer journey

Abstract

The Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing has been changing the way companies work and interact with their customers, through the collection of costumer data from different sources, providing valuable consumer insights about their needs. This research aims to analyze the perception of consumers living in Portugal regarding the use of AI in online display ads during the customers journey and in what circumstances do consumer perceptions change, for that, two experiments were conducted, a online questionnaire and a lab study relying on Neuromarketing tools. In both studies, the participants were randomly assigned to one of the experimental conditions (Assistant type: AI vs Human), showing two advertisings with the same visual appearance changing only the description in the eye-tracking case. The study results demonstrate that the use of assistant influence the participants perception of intrusiveness and privacy concerns. AI generated ads are considered less intrusive and less invasive than the human ads scenario. When exposed to ads made by robots, they show greater interest when compared to the human generated ad. The present study contribute to understand how valuable the personalized ads are to the customers, to identify the concerns with data privacy and the respective influence in the customers behavior and contribute with powerful insights to the Privacy vs Personalization Paradox.