Good morning,

Think of your favorite commercial. Maybe it makes you laugh out loud or tugs at your heart strings.

Now, imagine that every ad you see online speaks to you like this. It’s almost as if the advertisers know you, your personality, and the things that matter to you.

Welcome to personalized advertising in the age of generative artificial intelligence. By using free applications like ChatGPT—along with personal information about our browsing behavior, social-media posts, smartphone use, and more—advertisers can create highly personalized and therefore influential marketing appeals.

This week, we discuss a new study on the effectiveness of personalized ads written by ChatGPT. We also get some tips from the researcher on how marketing teams should think about working with AI today. Plus: What’s the opposite of personalized advertising—and why is that making a comeback, too?

Personality and persuasion–at scale

Kellogg’s Jacob Teeny, along with his colleagues, set up a robust series of studies that gauged how consumers reacted to personalized pitches written by ChatGPT. Overall, they found that this gen AI was able to write pretty persuasive copy. Here’s a quick breakdown of the results:

• Personalized ads designed by ChatGPT to appeal to a specific personality trait (e.g., extroversion) are more persuasive than generic ads.
• Knowing that the ads have been generated by ChatGPT to appeal to a given participant specifically doesn’t change their effectiveness.
• Messages personalized to participants’ personalities from data collected six months ago are still more effective than generic ads.
• Personalized ads are more effective for some things (e.g., a trip to Rome) than others (e.g., a pair of sneakers).

This latter finding makes sense, Teeny says, since someone’s personality might be more at play when selecting experiences (which can speak to many of a person’s traits) than a consumer product (which may speak to fewer). After all, extroverts and introverts both wear shoes but will likely have varying preferences for how they’d like to spend their free time.

You can read about Teeny’s study in greater detail in Kellogg Insight.

Beyond personalization

OK, so ChatGPT and other generative AI tools enable personalization at scale. But how else should marketing teams be using these tools today? Teeny has a few other ideas in mind, from amplifying creativity to getting to know your customers better (via new-customer personas, improved surveys, and interactive chatbots). You can check out his tips in Kellogg Insight.

All the sky’s your billboard

In this age of hyper personalization, I found it particularly interesting to read about a new trend that seems to be headed in the opposite direction: drone shows, which use the sky as a giant canvas to promote a brand.

Of course, “sky marketing” is nothing new. As Fast Company’s Elissaveta Brandon writes:

In 1922, a mysterious phone number appeared in the Manhattan sky, just above Times Square. The number, which was made of smoke, belonged to a hotel that ended up receiving more than 47,000 calls in under three hours. Skywriting was born, and companies like Pepsi, Ford, Chrysler, and Lucky Strike soon followed suit with their own campaigns. Pepsi was so fond of the idea that in 1940 alone, they scribbled their logo more than 2,000 times, across dozens of locations across North and South America.

After the heyday of skywriting came banner planes; today, it’s drone shows that are getting the most buzz. Kellogg’s Alex Chernev sees the appeal, as these shows allow brands to tell their story on the largest possible platform. (This is particularly true now that social media is able to capture these otherwise local, ephemeral events and transmit them to a much wider audience.)

After all, he says, “companies are looking for empty space that they can use to promote their services and brands, and there is plenty of sky.”

You can read more in Fast Company.