The research, which appears in the October issue of the American Marketing Association's Journal of Marketing Research used data provided by Havas Digital from Artemis, to address the questions of whether it is always optimal for advertisers to provide more specific advertising content based on consumers' earlier product interests, as well as when increased specificity of information in an ad is effective.
The researchers found that people who saw the personalized product information were on average less likely to buy a product on the day they were shown the ad than the people who were shown the more generic version. Highly-specific ads were generally not more effective than generic messages. This goes against the conventional wisdom that more specificity is always good.
