Disentangling Control and Personalization: Exploring the Effects of Ad Choice and Ad Personalization in Digital Advertising Effectiveness

Technology has changed how we process mediated information by enabling more interactive and relevant communication processes. Today, media communication is primarily shaped by both user control, where media users actively choose and determine their media experience, and system control, where media technologies and their underlying algorithms automatically generate and push relevant information to users. Understanding how both these processes influence media users’ perceptions of and responses to media messages is thus an important yet relatively unexplored topic in advertising research. This study aims to disentangle the effects of control and personalization in advertising. We explore how ad choice, representing self-controlled advertising communication, and ad personalization, representing system-controlled advertising communication, influence media users’ responses, including perceived control, perceived personalization, ad attitude, and visual attention. Findings showed an interaction effect between ad choice and ad personalization on perceived control. Ad personalization impaired perceived control only when consumers were given ad choices. We also found that having ad choices enhanced both perceived control and perceived personalization, which positively influenced ad attitude. Theoretical implications for disentangling the relationship between control and personalization as well as clarifying the conceptual differences between the objective and subjective aspects of these concepts are discussed.