Ideological Ad Targeting in Consumer Markets and the Political Market Place

Digitization has revolutionized advertising, paving the way for new business models and marketing strategies that harness highly detailed user data and statistical learning to target (potential) customers and voters online. While more sophisticated targeted advertising has benefited companies and could potentially lead to better-informed consumers and voters, it has also raised concerns regarding its negative side effects on consumer privacy and unintended economic, social, and psychological consequences.The highly targeted political advertising by Cambridge Analytica and ideologically driven advertising practices on Facebook have further fueled public concern about targeting based on users' political preferences. Despite the economic and social significance of this issue, little is known about how firms and political parties or campaigns ideologically target consumers and voters on the internet.In this project, we adopt a novel methodological approach to study online advertising: examining online advertising using artificial targets. We propose implementing this approach in two parts: Part 1 investigates whether and how firms target individual consumers based on their ideological preferences, while Part 2 explores how political parties and candidates target voters during election campaigns.