Data-driven Marketing: Opportunities, Challenges and Ethics

When: Friday, March 17, 2023, 2:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Where: Room 3.1, CCLS, Queen Mary University of London, 69 Lincoln's Inn Fields London WC2A 3JB

The online profiling of consumers through apps and internet browsing has led to more efficient, targeted marketing models. Opportunities for targeted communication arise in many different fields, making marketing more relevant, and a better consumer experience. At the same time, modern ad technologies raise complex ethical and legal questions which include, but go beyond questions of privacy and data protection. They raise more fundamental concerns about user manipulation, exploitation of the vulnerable and weaken the negotiation position of consumers, as business insight in consumer behaviour and the prediction of future behaviour challenge consumers’ (and in the case of political advertising, citizens’) autonomy. Risks also arise from AI recognizing patterns between consumer vulnerability and successful marketing of products which harm consumers’ health and well-being, such as in online gambling. Personalization and categorization of users has led to questions of discrimination and unfairness.

The workshop’s aims are to critically examine advertising technologies, the inadequacy of existing regulation such as the GDPR, and new proposals (such as the UK Online Safety Bill, the UK Online Advertising Programme and the EU Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act and the Modernization Directive and the Regulation on Artificial Intelligence) and extrapolate the ethics of such technologies from known examples. It will evaluate what are the dark patterns in data-driven marketing and how to counter them and whether regulation makes sense given the nature of the technologies.

• The workshop will cover questions such as:
• What is data-driven marketing and how does it work?
• What are the AI/ML technologies driving marketing in the 21st century?
• What are the latest technologies, emerging business models and stakeholders and how do they connect?
• Critical examination of data protection and consumer protection laws as well as ethical principles of fairness
• Lawyers have started to regulate “dark patterns”- is this concept helpful?
• Risks & challenges: social sorting, autonomy, inequality, price discrimination through prediction algorithms
• What are the regulatory options for data-driven marketing?
• How does it affect human autonomy?
• How does it affect human vulnerability?

View or download the full programme for Data-driven Marketing Opportunities [PDF 3,264KB].