Ad Me? The Effect of Facebook's Targeted Advertisements

Sammanfattning: Being categorized by others has strong effects on wellbeing. We care about how we are perceived by others, if others do not see you in the way you perceive yourself this have implications for your wellbeing and self-perception. One way marketers use this is by segmenting. Correctly identifying and categorizing a customer in a service encounter leads to significantly higher customer satisfaction. This is true for advertising as well, if we - as consumers - identify ourselves with the advertisement we will be more likely to want to buy what is advertised. In this thesis a new advertising medium will be further explored, social media. The purpose this thesis serves is to further research in the area and providing knowledge about the effects of categorizing consumers on social media. Testing for effects of a gender-categorizing ad, this is a quantitative study of the effects on the ad itself, the brand advertised, the product, spillover effects onto nearby advertisement and most importantly, self-esteem effects on the individual. The experiment was conducted through manipulation of two Facebook feeds, one containing an ad featuring a product targeted towards men and one featuring an ad targeted toward women. The results were that no significant changes in attitudes toward the ad, brand, product or surroundings could be detected. However, even when no attitude change was seen, negative effects on self-esteem of the participants could be detected. Incorrectly categorized participants displayed lower self-esteem after viewing categorizing advertisement in social media.