AI Ads Deliver Relevant Content, Respect Privacy
AI Ads Deliver Relevant Content, Respect Privacy
https://www.miragenews.com/ai-ads-deliver-relevant-content-respect-privacy-1697660/
Publish Date: 2026-06-23 12:38:00
Source Domain: www.miragenews.com
LAWRENCE — The idea that digital advertising depends on tracking users across websites has become a defining feature of the online economy. New research from the University of Kansas has found that artificial intelligence technology can be used to deliver relevant ads without spying on users.
As long as there has been advertising, companies and marketers have tried to target their messages to the most relevant audiences. Those capabilities have evolved with new technologies, but recent years have seen an increased push to regulate how marketers can surveil individuals to collect data for advertising purposes.
Those measures include Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, California’s Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act, and broader regulatory and industry efforts to phase out third-party cookies used for cross-site tracking.
Vaibhav Diwanji, assistant professor of journalism & mass communications at KU, has published an article detailing studies to determine whether AI could be used to develop contextual understanding of marketing that could be effective without surveillance.
“At the center of this work is a simple but important question: Can advertising remain effective if we remove the surveillance layer that has come to define much of the digital ecosystem?” Diwanji said. “Digital advertising has spent the last two decades building itself on a simple tradeoff. If you want relevance, you have to accept surveillance. Every improvement in targeting has come from collecting more data about people, tracking them across sites and inferring intent from behavior.
“What this work shows is that this tradeoff is not fundamental,” he said. “Relevance can come from something much more immediate and transparent, which is the context people are already engaged with in the moment.”
The article, published in the Journal of Promotion Management, details four studies Diwanji conducted to further understand AI-driven contextual…
