Name: _____________________________________________________
Reading Comprehension: Read the article about advertising. Match the correct headings to the
Sections. There is one option you will not have to use.
1. Section I: ___
2. Section II: ___
3. Section III: ___
4. Section IV: ___
5. Section V: ___
a. What Exactly Is Honesty in Advertising?
b. The Wedding Industry’s Advertising Tricks
c. The Rights and Wrongs of Using AI in Advertising
d. A More or Less Honest Use of Your Data
e. A Less Fair Kind of Advertising
f. Customers Should Control Their Data
Section I
The advertising industry has always been interested in understanding human behavior.
Technology is making this easier and easier. There are billions of Facebook users and even more
tweets shared on Twitter, as well as Google searches completed every second. On top of all this
now we have location-based data from mobile phones and transactional data from credit cards.
With the help of advanced algorithms, we can now understand in detail the motivations of almost
every consumer. These are powerful tools, and no one can blame the advertising industry for
using them. But AI also introduces worrying questions. Advertisers may soon know us better than
we know ourselves. They'll understand our most personal motivations and weaknesses. And if
we are not careful, they may start actually controlling our behavior instead of just trying to
persuade us. For these reasons, we need a new set of rules that will guide our use of AI in
marketing.
Section II
One of the new rules marketing professionals should follow is not to mislead customers on
purpose. Unfortunately, some companies currently do this, either by not being honest about the
way how they monitor your online activity, or why they do it. Providing users with information
about these is often not enough, however. If this information is at the bottom of the page in small
letters, it is very hard to notice or understand. Truth telling is more than just avoiding lying.
Consumers should always be told about how their personal data is being collected and used. In
practice this means that companies should make a reasonable effort to make sure that customers
truly understand how they do this. If they present the information in a way that is unclear to the
average consumer, we can’t really say that they’re telling the truth.
Section III
When you look at a webpage, some ads might appear on the side. These are called “contextual
ads” and are related to the webpage you visit at any online session. For example, a consumer
looking at a travel website for airplane tickets to Paris might see some ads for hotels in Paris on
the same webpage. These types of ads are three times as effective as regular online ads. They
are fairly innocent from a privacy perspective. The site collects little information about the
consumer. It doesn’t store much information about the visitor past the visit to this webpage.
Also, customers can immediately see the connection between the page and the ad. In other
words, the consumer is usually aware how the advertiser is using his information.
Section IV
Search engines (such as Google) and free email are more problematic. In 2012, Google put
together all the information it had about its clients from different products. The information
came from cell phones, search engines, email and YouTube. Now they know everything about us.
This is why if you send an email to a friend about getting engaged, Google might recommend
wedding videos to you on YouTube and ads about wedding rings elsewhere. Google says their
goal is to make their ads “just as useful to users as the search results themselves”. This seems to
be an innocent goal. However, it is worrying that as Google users search the Internet, Google is
collecting data about them. In other words, the viewer becomes the viewed, without even
knowing it.
Section V
Consumers must have the opportunity to take control of their own information. They should be
able to decide what data is collected about them and how it is used. They should also have the
freedom to “opt out”, that is, to not participate in this practice. A better system would be if online
marketers could buy consumers’ private information. They would pay for it either with money or
free access to websites. In such a system, consumers would be selling their own data, instead of
others who don’t even inform them of this.
1 point for each correct answer 5
B. Read the statements. Write T (true) or F (false).
6. ___ It is not clear to consumers why they see the contextual ads they are shown on a site.
7. ___People criticize the ad industry for using technology to collect data about the customer.
8. ___ The author thinks that nobody should be selling anybody’s data.
9. ___The author believes companies should try harder to explain how they handle our data.
10. ___ The author believes it is a good thing that Google ads are as useful to the users.
1 point for each correct answer 5
