A pleb on the web tries to understand psychographic targeting

Transcript

1. Psychographic targeting Siva Swaminathan
3. Background
4. How and why did this talk come about?
5. Diffusion of innovation Essentially, an analysis of sociology (individuals and social links). Very broadly applicable, for the spread of all kinds of ideas (fundamentally what makes us human?)
6. Legibilizing social interactions Electronic social networks which make up fabric of the web, are excellent for providing a legible map of sociography, allowing for surgical dexterity in targeted messaging.
7. What spreads effectively need not be innovation or even truth Reproduction, Variability, Heritability, Differential selection (Just needs a good fit into incidental constellation of environmental factors) (see arguments by Daniel Dennett, Bret Weinstein)
8. Methodological individualism (factorizable structure of mathematical models) Person is described by their interests Person is described by their psychography Person is described by their sociography
9. The marketing game
10. "Half our marketing budget is wasted … but we don't know which half!"
11. Tracing back to Edward Bernays (1928, 'Propaganda'), a close relationship between marketing and psychology. (Adam Curtis, 'The century of the self')
12. Innovation diffusion models Segment individuals into each stage of adoption Innovators, Early Adopters, Early majority, Late majority, Laggards Mapping between identifiable/targetable traits & segmentation
13. Market segmentation & user profiles Typically industry/context-specific analysis, sponsored by market leaders, or trade associations, or consulting agencies. eg: Only broad targeting (typically mass media) "Subarus for lesbians"
14. Structured models arbitrary tidbits Sub/urban lifestyle choices? Preferred car models? Which OS & browser? Thermostat prefetences? etc. ≫≫
15. Personalization: automated, and at scale "Direct marketing" (Lester Wunderman, 1960s) Convivial Industrial ⟶
16. The technical aspects of inferring profiles
17. Collaborative filtering N users, B behaviors Humongous sparse matrix Eg: Product recommendations, Ad effectiveness, Topic modeling, etc. ⟹ N × B
18. Low-rank approximations Simple algorithms, eg: SVD, NNMF, LDA [N × B] ≈ [N × r] ⋅ [r × B]
19. "Big (wide) data, with simple algorithms beats complicated models" Humans are not unique snowflakes, but well approximated into a handful of types
20. From how we behave to who we are Could we generalize across domains? What might be a more intrinsic characterization of people?
21. Big-5 (OCEAN) model Openness, Conscientousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism (rank-5 approximation, SOTA psychology reasearch)
22. Vacuuming up digital exhaust responses in silly quizzes links you click on time spent on various pages location tracking (bluetooth, GPS) Facial recognition and body trajectory Eyeball tracking etc. behaviors
23. Experiment summary
24. Models easily beat closest confindants!
25. More "factors" Demographics [who] (eg: age, gender, location, etc) Psychographics [why] Personality traits: (eg: OCEAN, thriftiness, risk aversion, etc.) Psychological states: (eg: mood, emotions, stress level, etc.) less temporally stable, but more effective? Other factors: Behavioral data [how] & Transactional data [what]
26. Using inferred profiles
27. Targeting by psychographics (1)
28. Targeting by psychographics (2)
29. "A/B testing" Counterfactuals, not just correlations
30. Other modalities of influence Which voice would have the desired influence? What wording would have the desired influence? Target messages for virality?
31. GPT3, and automated (personalized) content generation Eg: Adolos Substack GPT-3 autogenerated
32. Same methods for political messaging Psychometric Profiling: Persuasion by Personality in Elections (link)
33. Exploring consequences
34. Possible beneficial uses of personalization Mental health diagnosis and interventions Better matching (employment, dating, entertainment, etc) "Nudge" towards healthier outcomes Custom insurance premiums and interest rates
35. Uncomfortable examples Target pregnancy Uber "rides of glory" Large scale emotion manipulation study on Facebook
36. Fundamentally breaks common knowledge (eg: Say's law of one price) Discrimination (eg: "good" and "bad" price discrimination)
37. Psyops: Disinformation & Nonlinear war Mess with sense-making apparatus Spread FUD (war, elections, political polarization, etc) Correlate power usage to bring down the power grid! "Global village" (McLuhan, 1950s) (BLM protests in BLR and NZ, ignoring COVID lockdown!) Gerasimov doctrine
38. Assault on individual agency? At what point should we regulate targeted messaging like the Imperius Curse? (ambient nudges better -vs- direct control) Why is advertizing different from rape? (Memetics -vs- Genetics)
39. Thank you
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