Surveillance in the Advertising Landscape: Application of the DEAL Framework to Investigate Online Behavioral Advertising, Surveillance, and Users’ Responses on Instagram

Technology has allowed the creation of granular-level data that can provide detailed insights and analysis on consumers. This level of data allows marketers and advertisers to make better-informed decisions about their target consumers and tailor their strategies to specific customer segments. With an online experiment (N = 236), we examined how increased personalization of advertisements—more precisely the case of online behavioral ads (OBA) based on the brand match (vs. mismatch) and product match (vs. mismatch) with a previous web search—impacts consumers’ responses, avoidance, and attitudes mediated by perceived surveillance. The study found that perceived surveillance increases with brand match, leading to increased advertising avoidance and less positive attitudes toward the ad, product, and brand, but no relationship was found between product match and perceived surveillance, nor did it reveal an interaction effect between brand and product mismatch on perceived surveillance. This research contributes to theory by considering perceived surveillance as an antecedent to users’ responses and presents a framework to understand people’s perceptions of increased specificity of OBA ads based on previous web searches. Additionally, this study amplifies both the need to understand consumers’ responses to increased personalization and the need to balance consumers’ privacy with effective advertising strategies.