"Tracking browsing habits helped early digital advertisers slice up audiences and sell them to marketers. Search engines like Google let brands buy ads around specific requests and revealed clear user intent. Social networks like Facebook used detailed profiles and voluminous social interactions to promise ads that were both precisely targeted and displayed in the context of highly personalized feeds, making billions of dollars in the process."
"DirecTV wants to use AI to put you, your family, and your pets inside a custom TV screensaver. If that's not uncanny enough, you'll find items you can shop for within that AI environment, whether it's a piece of clothing similar to the one your AI likeness is wearing or a piece of furniture that pops up alongside it. That feature comes courtesy of a company called Glance,"
"These are opt-in features tucked into a marginal product. But in digital advertising, uncomfortable ideas have a way of working their way in from the fringes of the industry, and much bigger firms are already playing with technology that's at least conceptually similar to what Glance is offering here. Meta will generate AI avatars from a photo and then show you variations in your feed, which some users have mistaken for using their likenesses in targeted ads."
Online advertising evolved from tracking browsing habits and search intent to exploiting social profiles and interactions for precise, contextualized ads. Generative AI expands ad capabilities with automated copywriting, image generation, and leveraging chatbot interactions for personalization. Companies can generate custom user images, avatars, and immersive environments that embed shoppable items linked to a user's likeness. Firms like Glance build tools that create hyper-real images from selfies for instant purchases. Declarative opt-in features exist, but larger platforms already use similar AI-driven avatar generation and feed variations that can resemble targeted use of personal likenesses, shifting advertising toward deeper personalization.
Read at Intelligencer
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