The next speaker in this morning session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Joanna Strycharz, whose interest is in the connection between data donations and platform ad libraries. Personalised advertising on digital media platforms remains difficult to study, precisely because of the personalised and embedded nature of this advertising and the great diversity in ads run even by the same advertiser. Data available to researchers remain poor.
Various approaches for studying this include self-reporting, experiments, platform ad libraries, and tracking plug-ins, but none of these provide a complete user-level perspective on advertising. Data donations offer a further approach to this; what can such donated data reveal about the ads people encounter?
This project recruited some 150 students for a data donation study, capturing ad impressions, profiling categories, platform interaction, platform settings, and usage logs from Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon wherever they were available from the platform data download packages.
Of these, everyday activities could signal what goes into platform personalisation, though it does not reveal how the platform may have used such information; profile details show how platforms construct users in terms of interests, user segments, and topics; exposure (where available) shows which users see what ads at what point in time (but often lacks detail on the ad content itself); and user settings show how users seek to shape their exposure to ads and other content on the platform.
But how can all of this be converted into meaningful insights into a measure of persuasion processes on these platforms? These donated data need to be connected with information on the ads themselves, as well as the users’ own reflections on their experience, but connecting these has become increasingly difficult as platforms have reduced the range of data made available to users and researchers.
One approach here could be to link the data donations to the ad libraries that platforms must now provide, but this linking is made difficult by the lack of authoritative ad IDs that might connect them. At present, the best that the project can tell is which advertiser ran the ad, but not which specific ad was encountered.
