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Joseph Turow, "The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
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Joseph Turo
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Pete Kunze
welcome to New Books Network. I'm your host, Pete Kunze. My guest today is Joseph Toro, the Robert Louis Sheyhan professor of Media Systems and Industries Emeritus, and the author of the Problem with How Advertisers Learn to Make and Break Us From Ancient Times to the AI Age. The book was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2026. Good morning Joe. How are you doing today?
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Joseph Turo
I'm well, thank you.
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Pete Kunze
And thank you for joining me. I'm happy to Talk with you about pleasure? Yeah. Before we dive in, can you give listeners a sense of your background and the research interests that kind of brought you to this project?
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Joseph Turo
It's a long story. I'll try to make it short. My interest in media industries goes back to when I was in high school. My parents expected I'd be a lawyer. And I read a book about the law in my middle school library and was bored out of my mind. So I went around thinking, what am I going to do? And I ended up deciding, because I watched a lot of tv, that somebody writes these ads, maybe I'd be a copywriter. So I went to the Brooklyn Public Library and I read all these books, just about everything literally on the shelf in my neighborhood library about advertising. And I even got a subscription or a 17 to advertising age. And so that's what I intended to do when I went to Penn as an undergraduate. I left a copy of Advertising Age in the seminar room of one of my English professors. I was majoring in English. She found it, and when I asked her about it, she started railing against advertising. And I thought, gee, this is. Maybe she's wr. Write, you know. And at the time, Penn had almost no undergraduate courses in communication in any media stuff except film. There was a Monday night at the movies type class. But a guy named Garth Jowett, who later taught at the University of Houston, was teaching, when he was a graduate student, a freshman seminar on the history of mass media. And even though I was not a freshman, he allowed me to take it. And he told me about the Annenberg School and about graduate studies. And so I went to Annenberg and I got my master's and then went on for a PhD and my master's thesis was on. It was a quantitative analysis of advising and ordering patterns between men and women in soap operas compared to evening dramas. I was interested in power relationships. And this was early second feminism phase. And the idea was that men tend and women tend to watch in the evening, but the afternoon is pitched basically toward women. And the question is, how would the traditional stereotypes change, or would they, based on the shift in audience? And then I want to do some institutional work for my PhD. So I actually studied the children's book industry for complicated reasons. I couldn't get anyone to let me into the children's television industry. And I had a relative who worked in the children's book industry. And I studied the relationships between different types of book companies and their outlets. In those days and today, to some extent, too, there were two strands of book Publishing entertainment books for children. Some publishers focused on the book and department store industry, parts of the industry and others focused on school and public libraries entertainment books. And I was interested in how that different client relationship affected what a book was for children. It even affected what a child was in the minds of the people. So it was actually a very interesting study. It involved interviews, involved surveys of librarians and, and some content analysis. And it became a book some years later called Getting Books to Children. So that was my first large scale industry sort of research. So I did others while I was a graduate student.
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Pete Kunze
And then what brought you to this project in particular? When did you realize?
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Joseph Turo
So to just follow it up between my, my dissertation and when I started doing advertising research, my first job was at Purdue University and I taught there for 10 years. And almost all the work I did there was on Hollywood. I studied a lot about the Hollywood industry, particularly focusing on television. I looked at innovation in tv. I looked at casting. The major work that I did ended up in a book called Playing Doctor, which was about the history of the relationship between medicine and the television industry and essentially the history of the formula of the Dr. Show. And that got published in 1989. But in 2010, the University of Michigan Press asked me to update the book. So I updated all the way through Grey's Anatomy. And that was an interesting study, if I say so myself. And then when I got back to Penn as a professor, being on the East Coast, I began to realize how advertising was changing dramatically. This was the period really before the Internet became commercialized, where advertising was more and more thinking of the advertising people were thinking of targeting and it was becoming a thing. And I began to write about that. And my first book on the advertising industry from 1996 was called breaking Up America, which was about the rise of target marketing. In fact, the Internet takes up only about two pages in the entire book because it had just become a commercial phenomenon. But in this book, the Problem with Personalization, I kind of return to some of the themes that I had in the earlier book, the, you know, Breaking Up America. But between Breaking Up America and this book, I wrote about in, for example, in 19, in 2006, I wrote a book called Niche Envy, which is about the way in which digital marketers were bringing target marketing to the Internet. I wrote a book called the Daily you, which was about how the media buying system is changing in America and what the social implications are. Then I wrote a book called the Aisles have Eyes, which was about how retailing, which media people don't Tend media, academics tend not to focus on retail. And we can talk about this subject. Retailing is a critical area of media. Think about it. Supermarkets are basically media systems and there are cavalcades of media from floor mats to sound systems to a whole lot of other things. So that was that book. And then in 2021 I had a book really about biometrics and smart speakers called the Voice Catchers. And this book, it goes, sort of tries to bring a lot of that together and talk about how media have become so much more personalized in ways that a lot of people think this is a new phenomenon. And what I try to do in the book is to explode that idea. That is personalization is as old as the advertising system. And not only that, it is a lot of the values that media people brought to the Internet were established in direct marketing and direct mail companies through the 20th century. But it's even more so. And I talk about how that works now and how we got to that and what the paradigms are.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah, one of the points you make early on that I think I hadn't really thought about until you said it in your book was personalization is so central to advertising in our media culture now and yet we kind of have missed it. Right. We've been talking about algorithmic bias, we've been talking about data privacy and issues that it raises for individuals. But kind of the process of personalization, particularly commercial personalization, has been kind of neglected. Can you talk more about that?
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Joseph Turo
Neglected. And they've used the term personalization usually in the last few years. But it is true that academics have not paid enough attention to it. For example, Tim Wu wrote a, he's a professor at Columbia in the law school, wrote a book called the Attention Merchants about the history of advertising. Well, that's a very limited idea of what advertising is. Advertising is not just about attention. I mean, during the 20th century in the television era, maybe attention was considered terrifically important. But really advertising is about change. It's about grabbing onto people and getting them to so called convert to purchase things. It's about engagement, not just attention. And the history of advertising is about grabbing a person by the lapel. I mean, in the days of the, the salesperson in the 19th century or the peddler who would go around from community to community taking notes about families that that person dealt with. Almost like today we have databases, they had notebooks and they would charge different prices to different networks and they would return knowing what they had to speak to these people about. It's really quite fascinating. There aren't that many books about peddlers, but they all talk about essentially of sales. And in the 20th century, we lost that. Because the kind of standard idea of 20th century history among academics has been mass media, the rise of radio, the rise of movies, the rise of television, and the focus on reaching as many people as possible and trying to figure out how these people are seeing and whether they're seeing the ads. But even during the 20th century, underlying that was the growth of what originally was called direct mail and later became called direct marketing. And that system, which I lay out in the book, is quite fascinating and goes back to the 19th century. And even patents on coupons. People don't even think about how important the coupon was and how the coupons set the pattern for the Internet in many ways. Or consider the barcode. I don't know if you think about the barcode, Peter, but the barcode, I would argue, is one of the most important inventions of the 20th century. It was created by two graduate students at Drexel Institute for Technology, now Drexel University, who overheard a dean talking to a supermarket executive about how difficult it was to track what people were buying. And they went home and they created this. But this is 1948. But it really wasn't brought to bear in supermarkets until the 70s and 80s, but a fundamentally changing technology which by the Internet time, they began to realize, hey, you could actually track people, individuals this way and focus on coupons. Do you know when the first coupon came out in the United States, it was for Coca Cola. The owner of Coca Cola gave out free coupons. He didn't necessarily call them that to get Coke around Atlanta, Georgia. And then when he sold his company, the person who picked it up, a guy named Chandler, went ahead and he also put out coupons. And then there were other coupons, too. And people began, as I suggested earlier, to actually get patents for coupons because the post office was really interested. And as we could talk about the whole history of the post office and direct mail, and then, as I say, direct marketing, which involved 800 numbers, which we don't tend to think about much anymore. But on television until, like, the 80s and 90s, people were constantly being dinged to dial an 800 number in order to get a particular product. And, of course, companies kept records of who was calling and then sent mail to them. So this whole underlying world of direct marketing was advancing at the same time that everybody was talking about mass marketing and they hated each other. The mass marketers looked down on the direct marketers because they said their stuff is too crude. Okay? It's not fancy enough. It's not classy enough. The direct marketers looked down on the what they call display advertisers because they said, you can't prove anything. We can prove what we do. We put out a coupon. We know how many people give it back in. So it wasn't until the Internet where the two began to combine. So today, what we see in the Internet space and Internet marketing. Internet advertising is really a combination of the paradigms of display advertising together with the paradigms of direct marketing. And they don't even call it that anymore because it's still considered contaminated to call things direct marketing. So now it's called performance advertising or performance marketing. It's the same thing.
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Pete Kunze
So at the heart of what you were just saying is this increasing need to understand the audience. And I think, you know, in that traditional way that we do as academics, you almost have to create the audience before you can understand it. Right. And advertising is at the heart of that. So can you talk more about how the development of advertising is also kind of a development of both creating and understanding audiences?
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Joseph Turo
Sure. That's the key. Audiences are not real. They're constructed. And that's something that I actually learned most back in my dissertation days. I began to realize that a child was a construct by the publishers, depending on whether they were targeting the librarians or the bookstores, because they were the ones who were buying the books, not the kids. Okay? Just like your students and mine are not the textbook targets. It's the professors who buy the books. And the students have to read what the professors choose. So an audience is a construct, and the ways in which audiences are constructed are a function of the reward system of that particular industry. Now, it doesn't mean that audiences are not real in the sense that these constructs are totally irrelevant. I can say that you're a young, say 18 to 35 year old male, living in New Orleans. And that's perfectly accurate, but it doesn't take into account a million other potential characteristics about you. Okay. Or ability or anything. So the decisions to choose some characteristics about somebody rather than others are a function of that reward system. And that's what we mean when we talk about audiences as constructed realities. They're constructs. And it's what I call the industrialization of audiences, which is at the core of what happens in media. And that's why advertising is so important. Because advertisers, at least in so many of the key industries that we're talking about, key media industries, not all of them advertisers, set the idea of what constructs they care about. Most of the time. For example, they don't care if you go to church on Sunday. That's not a criterion for an advertiser. So most media companies don't pay attention to that. Disney's not going to care whether you're a churchgoer. But if you're a male or a female and have certain kind of income and have a certain race or ethnicity, that becomes an important criterion.
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Pete Kunze
And so you've directed many in dissertation. I can imagine when you decide to write on this topic, focusing in on how you're going to do it could be intimidating. Right. And your approach here is a historical approach. Right. What we're supposed to call the long dure in academia, where we're looking at the longer trajectory and you go back to ancient times to help us kind of work our way towards this moment. I'd love to hear more about why the historical approach was the one that you felt was most useful for kind of underscoring the exigency of commercial personalization for today's consumer and scholar of media.
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Joseph Turo
Thanks for asking that question. I think that too many students today, including the ones I teach, don't know anything about media history. At Annenberg, we don't even have a course in media history. And I don't know how many places do and what exactly they would study. Very, very few people understand the history of advertising. And it's critical if you want to understand media today, to understand advertising today. Critical. The reason I focus so much on history, aside from the fact that I think it's fascinating, is that we really need to know how we got here in order to understand what we're doing, what people are doing here. You can't understand today's advertising system on the Internet if you really understand it. If you don't realize that it had its roots in a larger scheme that goes back hundreds of years. Not only that, you may think that the changes that can be made from a policy standpoint might be easier than they are actually, if you think that these are only transitory developments that had to do with the Internet. If you realize that personalization is at the core of the advertising system, you realize you can't just get rid of it. It's not something that we could policy out of it. This is a fundamental aspect of what advertising is about. The 20th century is in many ways an anomaly where advertisers skipped over a lot of personalization in many areas of life. But even by the late 20th century, cable companies were grasping, as Lee McGuigan has shown, for ways to personalize advertising. But you really need to understand the context in which we exist today in order to understand the possibilities and the activities.
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Pete Kunze
And along those lines, I think what readers will find in reading your study is one for an academic book. It's written in a refreshingly clear and accessible way. I mean, it really kind of flows so nicely and you cover so much. But then you bring in these elements that I never would have thought of in media history, including the importance of patent medicine. Can we talk a little bit about that? I thought that was really interesting.
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Joseph Turo
Can't understand media without understanding patent medicine. Turn on any channel. Today, When I watch CNN, for example, I would say that 60% of all the ads are patent medicine ads. You know, they follow the patent medicine kind of paradigm, which is basically products that are probably. Well, in the old patent medicine case, medicines were actually created with arsenic and liquor. Sometimes they could actually hurt you. Oftentimes they did nothing. A few times they worked. The reason patent medicines are important historically, I should say, by the way, that patent medicine reason it's called patent medicine, is because the companies making them claim that they had patents on them as if to give them a greater sense of importance. And the patent medicine companies, we're talking mid-1800s, mid late 1800s, bought up so much space in newspapers in the US at the time that they would write in their contracts that if anything happened to the state legislature, where they would deny the ability of these companies to sell their wares, the contracts would automatically be voided. So it really encouraged the editors not to have any editorials against patent medicine. And that's why they got away with so much of doing stuff during the late 19th century that would have been normally been considered. People would be aghast at was only with the rise of certain magazines like The Ladies Home Journal, which had the guts to say, we're not going to accept patent medicine ads and we're going to have articles written against them. Which really led to the Pure Food and Drug act of 1905, which kind of was the beginning of the traditional, dangerous patent medicines. But patent medicines, the rhetoric that patent medicines used set the pattern for traditional advertising in the 20th century for display advertising. Many of the great copywriters of the 20th century, like Claude Hopkins, started in the patent medicine business, and they learned the rhetoric and they just adapted it to other areas of life, from Pepsodent to Cheerios.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah. I don't know how much time you spend on TikTok, but, you know, so much of the energy and the content that comes my way on TikTok are laymen trying to sell me supplements. Right. And I think. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It just seems like there's a continuity to be made between the historical president you're rehearsing for us in your book and these wellness folks pushing supplements that we don't need. And you start to say, do I need more apple cider vinegar? Do I need more creatinine? And then you talk to your doctor and they're like, no.
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New Books Network Host
Yeah.
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Joseph Turo
And the stories are great. One of the things I tried to do. I'm glad you said the book is readable, Peter, but I tell a lot of stories in the book, particularly about these companies and about people. And I would suggest that, say, a graduate student reading the book could take strands of this stuff and create whole studies, even dissertations around it. There's an enormous amount of fascinating work to do in the history of advertising and its relationship to today.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah. Along those lines, I was also kind of struck in the chapter on moving from print to television. Right. You know, how does Nielsen kind of come ahead? Right. I think this is an interesting story you tell as well. And at the heart of that, in some ways, is this current crisis and expertise we hear about. Right. Who actually knows things, what's actually the truth. And Nielsen saying, I know I have my approach. Right. Until they didn't. Right. So I was hoping you could. You could talk more about how television is a crucial precedent here, particularly in this kind of battle over ratings and how ratings become crucial to. And audience measurement become crucial to. You know, I can help you understand your audience. I can. I know. I know. What I know is actual.
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Joseph Turo
Let me back up. Nielsen is part of that. But I would argue that the really important kind of thread that starts this is what often people refer to John Wanamaker I call it Wanamaker's dilemma. And sometimes they say it's Lord Liever Jung. But I think it was probably John, at least one person who said it was Wanamaker who said at the turn of the 1900s, I know that half of my advertising works, but I'm not sure which half. That was the dominant dilemma of the 20th century for advertisers and has become a holy grail. Nielsen was one attempt for advertisers to try to figure this stuff out at a time when, at least in the non direct marketing arena, there was no way to really call on people. I mean, Nick Johnson, who was a Federal Communications Commissioner, wrote a book, how to talk back to your television set. And that was totally metaphorical because there was no way to do it. And there were, as you suggested, a number of companies that were trying during the radio era to understand the audience, understand meaning, basically construct it based upon certain characteristics, initially just the numbers and then maybe male females, where they lived. Nielsen came out on top for reasons I talk about in the book. But there was competition with Nielsen even in the television arena. And Nielsen had this thing called the autometer, which it developed over time into the people meter. And it was designed to try to follow what people watched on TV and later what they watched on cable and later what they watched anywhere. So you took it around with you and it became very, very complex. Today Nielsen has tens of thousands of people who are in their sample and they actually audit what people look on the Internet at. It's still basically audio, visual stuff, but their idea is we set the pattern of what the audience really is and they're hoping that has certain credibility. They have competitors because advertisers chafe at having to pay Nielsen alone. They figure if there's competition that might be better. But Nielsen still is around and still does what it does. But in some ways advertisers are going beyond it into new ways of what they call attribution. And all of this has to do with AI and how we attribute what a person sees at this point in time. For example, an advertiser can go to Google or Meta and instead of creating the material by itself, Google will create an ad for the advertiser with the idea that it has a better chance of converting to sales than anything the advertiser could do. So now the media company is actually creating the ad for the advertiser, often in small medium sized businesses, but even beyond that, and it's a new era in understanding what does it mean to do creativity, what are creators about? And how important is the creator in an advertising agency? More and more ad agencies are becoming media buying systems and systems that essentially are collecting data about audiences and about the media that they use in order to advance their clients, thinking about where to place ads.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah, I definitely want to talk more about artificial intelligence, but before we get there, I was hoping we could talk about direct marketing. You know, there's a tendency among, you know, certain sectors of media history to focus on screen media. Right. But I think this book is a reminder of how important mail is for our understanding that. Yes, yes. Post postal circulation, let's say.
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Joseph Turo
Oh, that. I was a mailman for a while.
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Pete Kunze
My father was a mailman in Philadelphia, so I have a lot. I love the mail service in Minneapolis. No, no, I'm from Philadelphia.
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Joseph Turo
Oh, wow. I was a mailman when I was a graduate student. In the summer, I worked in Manhattan delivering parcel post. And in Flushing, Queens, I was a terrible mailman. But I learned a lot about the post office and appreciated it. And the history of the post office is really important. And Richard Johns and I wrote an op ed in the Washington Post, I guess, a couple of years ago now about the importance of the post office, which is in terrible trouble. But the relationship with the post office and media in the course of American history is critical. It's very hard to appreciate the growth of newspapers and books in America without appreciating the idea that Congress provided for discounts for books and for printed matter in ways that really helped those firms. The direct mail developed in tandem with these sorts of activities in the late 19th, early 20th century. It also developed with something called rural free delivery, which was the idea that a person before the late 1800s, if they wanted to pick up their postal mail, would have to go to the nearest town. By the early 1900s, most areas in the US had postal deliveries directly to people's homes. And that was a critical factor which encouraged direct mail and direct packages, that the post office began to actually have parcel posts in the early 1990s. So companies like Sears, Roebuck, and Montgomery Ward could deliver postal stuff directly to your home. And we don't know Sears much anymore because it's a shell of what it used to be. But they were the Amazon of their era. And the thing about it was that the Sears catalog was probably the most important media element of the early 20th century. A lot of people kept it on their night table next to the Bible. It was that important. So there's a whole world of media stuff that we don't Tend to include in our discussions of what media are. And direct mail is a very important part of that.
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Pete Kunze
And how is that important in the history of personalization?
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Joseph Turo
Well, direct mail people, and later direct marketing people, one of the key parts of their world was trying to figure out how to target people. Even in the late 1800s, you could buy lists of people so by their occupations. For example, literally, like in the book, I talk about how you could buy a list of people who had artificial limbs, okay? And there were thousands of different mailing lists that companies could buy and use to sell people different things. And that idea of targeting individuals and finding enough about them so that the targeting could be worth it is that whole paradigm carried over into the digital era and particularly into the Internet era, which, you know, in 1995, when the Internet became commercialized, the browser came online, it became a commercial activity. It wasn't as if some few people sat around saying, now what are we going to do? Now how are we going to make money? It was quite clear that one of the key ways to make money was to do it with advertising. And while some of the earliest ads were display ads like for Wired and stuff like that, right from the beginning, the notion of the interactivity of the medium had to be critical. So, for example, what happened in the earliest days is I talk about this in the book. You would go online to a website, okay? And let's say the website sold stuff. So you could go and you click on the item and you could go to a card and check out, right? But let's say you wanted to buy more than one thing. The website could not follow you. There was no persistence of identity. And so it was driving companies crazy. And that led to the creation of the cookie. And it was the cookie that really jump started the world of direct marketing in the digital realm way back in 1995. And once the cookie started, companies began to realize they could use a chore to track what people did in a particular site and what they purchased and all. But they could also use it in somewhat varied form to track people across sites and to follow them. And if you string out the logic for cookies and all the things that followed cookies, pixel trackers and all the other things, that was really the beginning of the linkage between direct marketing and the Internet. But picking up on all those paradigms that I mentioned earlier, it wasn't as if they said, hey, now what do we do? They had a history for it.
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Pete Kunze
And in the later half of your book, you get us into thinking about artificial intelligence, right? And I think we're in this interesting moment in our society and culture where there's all this fear and anxiety about what AI will do, but it's already here. Right. And so I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about how artificial intelligence came in and reshaped commercial personalization.
- [38:05]
Joseph Turo
Okay, that is true. The first, say, three or four chapters are about the history of this, how we got to there, and then, and as I said, even things like the barcode and, and all of that. Then I shift to talking about the rise of artificial intelligence. First predictive artificial intelligence and then generative artificial intelligence, and then the linkage between the two. And then. So what, what do we mean by all that? How does it work? AI helps companies, first of all, in terms of predictive AI, because what, what they do is they take. And we could go into the whole way in which this works, which I talk about, but basically what we're talking about is pattern recognition. It. It can bring together huge data points, huge numbers of data points, and then make sense, quote unquote, of those data points for marketers in ways that probably no individual could. So I give the example of Victoria's Secret. Victoria's Secret had emails that they were sending out to people based upon the traditional ways of using computers to log individual kind of data points about people. And, and they weren't getting very far. They were very frustrated with it. So they started using predictive analytics on their material and they began to realize they could use. Get hundreds of data points to the, to the point that they could actually figure out what kinds of things a person getting in the email would be interested in in their catalog. And then they use generative AI, we're talking like the early 2000s now, to create the pictures for those people and the subject headings. So that you. As one person said, that's in the book. He said he was the head of marketing for Victoria's Secret. He said it used to be that it was just say one category of people, and now it's the, say Joseph Turo category, you know, the one individual. And we can create hundreds of thousands, even millions of emails. And Google helps to do that too in Gmail for the particular advertiser. Millions of concatenations.
- [40:36]
Pete Kunze
So I have a problem in my class and I want to ask your help for it while I have you here, which is, you know, I go with, I talk to my students about these issues of data privacy, algorithmic bias. Bias.
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Joseph Turo
Yeah, yeah.
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Pete Kunze
Commercial personalization. I get them to see like, hey, you know, you are being sold, right? Go back to the old Dallas smite stuff. Like, get them to see the way in which they are generating massive revenue. And they're just kind of like, yeah, it's awful. And then I'm like, well, what do we do about it? And they get kind of like, you know, I don't want to pay for it, so it's like, it's fine. Exactly. I'm wondering how you personally respond to those who might say, well, I hear what you're saying, Joe, but like, is it really that bad? And you make it pretty clear in the beginning it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [41:29]
Joseph Turo
And this book, I. I actually have been involved my. Between Breaking Up America and the. And the. This book, I did lots of work on privacy. And not only did I do the books I mentioned to you, I don't know if you know it, but we've done multiple national surveys, nine national surveys that talk about what Americans know, major surveys done by polling companies, what Americans know about privacy, about marketing, and what they think. And the short answer is they don't know very much at all. And even though many of our students know how to use these media, they don't know anything about what goes on behind the screen. Maybe when you teach them, they might, but I ask students every year when I teach the class that I taught for 50 years, I asked them if they ever had a class at high school about media. And very, very few people do. The only ones who tend to do that are the ones who were working for the school newspaper. And it turns out that the way the school can control the newspaper is by making it into a class, according to the Supreme Court. So that's why they have classes. But teachers don't understand this stuff. They don't convey it to students. We're in a terrible situation in America today about civic knowledge when it comes to media, and particularly the digital media. And so that's one thing. I've also been involved in a lot of class action suits regarding Facebook and Google and many other companies. So I've gotten to actually read a lot of the memos these people send around, and it's pretty scary. I can't talk about it because of the legal requirements. Having said that, and having said that, I'm very concerned about privacy and the way we've been talking about it. One of the reasons I wrote this book was to depart from that concern to the larger concern, which is societal. Maybe the students, if they think about it, would be more influenced not by themselves as being the focus, but about the idea that what this is doing, what personalization is doing, is not just surveillance and not just watching you as you watch tv, but it's creating an environment where you become a mono node more and more. And this is a slow process that has been taking place incrementally since say the 1990s, but it's really moving up now quickly because of AI, where individuals are going to be surrounded by, by messages that advertisers think they would be interested in. And they're constructed with. It's happening with advertising and what advertisers call hyper personalization. You may get Kay Jeweler ads, where I get Tiffany ads, things like that. You may begin to think, gee, what's different about me than Joe Turo? Why, why am I, you know, so you may think of your status within society, but it's more than that. More and more people begin to see the world differently from one another. And they begin to say, and there's some sociology out of Stanford around this. Why is it that certain people are looking at the world this way? When I watch the news, I don't see that. And the sociologists say it's about. They get angry. I would say they get discombobulated when it comes to sort of personalization. The idea that we become wrapped up and it's not just advertising increasingly, it's becoming entertainment. You can now, with the elements that we have already with AI, you can make a show where the main characters fit your demographic or the demographic that you care about. All right? So you may be seeing different characters as a show from a mate. You may get different headlines based upon whether they think you click on ads, if they're positive headlines or negative headlines. Already the New York Times profiles the, does the main page based on. Companies may change their, their stories based on that. You may get different movies that you stream based on that. And politicians are now using all of these techniques in ways that are designed to essentially corrupt our political process. Okay, And I'm not exaggerating the notion of personalization, the notion of using influencers in ways that in politics they don't even tell you that they're being paid. The rise of synthetic influencers, which some advertisers say people are perfectly comfortable with and may even think are more persuasive than regular influencers because they can be so modified for what you would be liking as an influencer. All of these things are more and more jump started with personalization and they're moving in such a way they're, they're being weaponized against society. I would argue they're really antisocial. And while we are sitting talking about it saying, gee, it doesn't look so bad now we are being seduced into it. I mean, you try to. I have an example about my buying this LG television set, right. Where it's almost impossible to load the TV set without saying that you'll accept all of their tracking if you including biometrics with voice. And I talk about how Walmart now owns Vizio. They didn't buy Vizio because the chief executives likes to watch television. They bought Vizio because it is part of their retail media network which allows advertisers to personalize. Not just while you're walking through Walmart and getting an ad on their app based on what they think about you, whether you're pregnant or not or something like that, but also see Walmart ads, I.e. ads for Walmart advertisers on Vizio and on the free television programs that Vizio has, just like LG has its own free quote unquote television where they stream ads based on what they know about you and what they know about you is enormous. So this is. Think about what it's going to be for your grandchildren. And this is just the beginning of a process where society becomes more and more a seduction process to create the individual rather than the community. That's what I'm really worried about. And I don't know if your students can think this through. As I say, it's extremely seductive. Who doesn't want to get stuff they like? You know, who doesn't want to get Spotify lists that are based upon your music habits? It becomes part of the world in which we live.
- [49:01]
Pete Kunze
Yeah, no, I mean, this is incredibly useful for me in the classroom because, you know, my students and I, I'm on the entertainment side of media industry studies and you know, we talk about what are the implications for generative AI and you get this hyper personalized content as you're talking about. But how do I talk to you about it? I can't.
- [49:20]
Botox Chronic Migraine Announcer
Right.
- [49:20]
Pete Kunze
Because we didn't see the same thing. I saw the version.
- [49:22]
Joseph Turo
Right, exactly.
- [49:23]
Pete Kunze
Yeah. So it's completely deleterious to anything that is a problem.
- [49:29]
Joseph Turo
But if you put it within the social context of how do we create community that way, that becomes an issue. And toward the end of the book I have a set of suggestions as to how they're really provocations, you know, in terms of what do we do about this? So if I can read a couple of them, for example, a few of them. One is required that all companies use of marketing data be opt in which it is now that's not a panacea, but at least people know what they're getting into. They'll do it anyway. But then don't allow firms to treat first party data more leniently than third party data. We have created a fetish around the idea that first party data are acceptable. Because after all, if you read the New York Times, why shouldn't you think that it's okay for the New York Times to get the data they get about you? But just because you read it and pay for it doesn't mean you accept the idea that Times can use your data. The third is prohibit marketers from using third party data providers. I talk a fair amount about the third party data industry in the book and in other books that I've written. They're a menace and they shouldn't be around. I think that they basically are taking data about people online and offline and using it and selling it in ways that we have no understanding of. I say require advertisers to post an icon, for example, an embellished tee on every doesn't stand for turo, but targeting an embellished T on every personalized ad which when clicked will explain in detail the information the firm used to target the ad. If they can't do that, and sometimes they can't, they shouldn't be allowed to target the ad. You should know why you're getting this in some detail and why they chose you. Then take the trading of a person's location, for example, on a programmatic exchange. And I talk about what programmatic exchanges are which are critical to understanding advertising today. If your listeners, if our listeners don't understand a programmatic exchange, read my book. But you really have to know about this stuff. Taking the trading personal location, make that legal only on a case by case opt in basis. Location marketing is potentially menacing. So for example, you can follow a person to a, an abortion clinic and somebody could buy whether you're near that clinic or not. That's dangerous. And anyway, why should we want companies following us? There's a whole thing about geoconquesting. This is a major issue, following people. We are sold all the time without knowing it as to what our location is. And as we get into more. Do it yourself Cars. Would cars drive themselves? The car industry is thinking of itself as basically an entertainment industry. So you'll be sitting inside the car and you're getting ads based upon where you are and what you're doing and that raises a whole lot of other issues. But location marketing is a big thing. Then if a person opts in to a firm trading their location at a particular moment, require the marketer to make explicit when an actual place based advertising incident takes place by lighting up the phone and sending a text message. So you really ought to know that this is going on then publishers and advertisers should give people the right to try on different identities. If I want to be a 15 year old kid in Wyoming for a day and find out what advertisers legitimately would target that person with, I should be able to do it. And that would allow me to get involved with a whole lot of understanding of what this new world is about. Right now we're in cocoons, but let's break out of those cocoons. And then publishers and advertisers should give one day a week over to content without personalization. Now is that going to happen? Probably not. But if enough people militate for it, maybe we will see that. That is, I want to know, let's have a time when everybody gets the same junk in the same stuff. And what does that mean? We're not used to that anymore. Maybe it would raise some really interesting questions about the nature of community in a media system today. And the last one is educate youngsters about the Internet and marketing with the understanding that nowadays that kind of knowledge is civic knowledge. It has to be. This is not a peripheral part of our lives. This is at the center of entertainment, of news, of politics. And if we don't understand how this works from the time we're young, we're in trouble.
- [54:46]
Pete Kunze
I mean, you make a powerful case for that at the end. And I really admired that because, you know, so often in our work we diagnose a problem, but we can't really offer treatment. And I think you offer a lot of provocations for, for your readers to kind of take up and consider. My question for you now is where, what are you hoping will come out of this book? Where do you see as potential research people might take on? What do you see as potential social action that could come out of this?
- [55:15]
Joseph Turo
Well, the social actions I suggested already, I don't know. Again, if we can begin to get social discussion about these topics and about other topics in the book, that would be great. I think because privacy has been the focus to such an extent, we often forget the larger societal issues. And that's what I'm trying to push here. Right. In terms of academics and graduate students, for example, and even professors. I would argue the book has so many strands of potential research that a person can do, whether it's about the history of advertising and its relationship to today, to the ways in which artificial intelligence are moving forward even beyond what's happening in the book. Look at agentic commerce, for example, how agents. I touch about this somewhat, but it's moving like crazy how companies are creating agents that we will work with, that will learn all about us and essentially do the work for us in order to plan trips, in order to buy things based upon enormous numbers of data points they have about us that may or may not be cognizant to us and that may infer things about us that, gee, I didn't know you thought this way about me. You know, so it is a. It's. We're at a window of a new world where we will see ourselves through these agents, and the agents will help us deal with the world in ways that the agents infer about us. So there's a lot of research that can be done on this, both in institutional senses, understanding the way that media operate, which I think is critical, but also, as I've done national surveys to find out what people are doing and even some experiments in this regard.
- [57:15]
Pete Kunze
So that leads me to my final question, which is, what are you working on Now? I know you've just finished a major new book, but I'm curious if you're
- [57:22]
Joseph Turo
taking a break or, you know, right now I'm trying to get people to think about the book. So that's part of it. But you know, what I'm interested in, and I've been planning it, though it's complicated because it's very different from. I'm interested in casting. Casting is a fascinating area that since I did the work on casting in the late 70s in Hollywood, I was studying the casting of small parts. In Hollywood, almost no one has done research on casting that's been published. That is, Stuart Yuen wrote a book about typecasting. But I'm talking about the institutional aspects of choosing characters. Whom do you choose for a particular role? Why, if you watch a commercial, why is this person there with black hair? Why do they have an African American in the ad and not an Asian? You know, why do they have a woman of this age? You know, some of it may be obvious. Some of it is these kinds of. And how does it change now based on personalization? And how does it change based upon the. If we can create more and more synthetic ads, what is it going to morph. Is casting going to morph? And this is not just on television. It is, of course, an influencing and display ads and interactive ads. So I'm trying to figure out how I can get my hands around this huge topic of casting as an example of ways in which personalization and new digital media converge on how we see ourselves and others.
- [59:01]
Pete Kunze
That's really fascinating. I can think of some work by Kristen Warner, now Martin on race and casting. But now thinking about Tilly Norwood. Right. And you know, the idea of this composite woman being created. Right.
- [59:14]
Joseph Turo
Yeah, it was kind of. I don't know that anybody's actually used her. I think people are. Are not wanting to. Although I read recently there was a Iranian, I believe, British filmmaker who just did a piece on Iran's killing of 45,000 people by the regime a few years ago. And he did this movie totally, synthetically, totally AI I don't know how long the movie is, but as much as SAG and writers are militating against this, I see down the line artificial intelligence is going to pervade movie making and streaming and all that. It's almost inevitable. I don't think it's going to be totally the case, but more and more we're going to see it. It's going to dribble out first, and then the dam is going to break. And if you think about video games, there's a real fight in the video game industry around the use of artificial intelligence, when it can be used, whether it should be used, and. But the cost of video games is so huge. Do you know how much the new Grand Theft Auto costs?
- [60:37]
Pete Kunze
I mean, they rival global blockbusters, right? We're talking hundreds of millions.
- [60:42]
Joseph Turo
The new one, the one that's coming out, was over $2 billion to make it okay. So the cost of these things are so astonishing. And while even though fans are very much against the use of AI in the creation of video games, I suggest we're going to see it dribble, dribble, dribble, bong. And down the line, we're at a liminal period of audience construction. That is, people today remember a time when AI didn't exist. Just like people today don't remember a time when television didn't exist. Most of my students today don't remember a time when the Internet didn't exist in their home. It takes time for people to see things as normal, as natural. And the advertising industry and marketers in general and the media, one of the things they do best is to get people to believe that things are normal, natural, and always been that way. It takes a while, but that's what happens. And that's another reason it's so important to understand history.
- [62:01]
Pete Kunze
Yeah. This has been wonderful. Joe, thank you so much for your time today. It's really been a pleasure.
- [62:06]
Joseph Turo
Glad you're interested, and I hope people will read it. And if they do, please get back to me with your comments, your criticisms, your readings.
- [62:17]
Pete Kunze
And I believe there's also an audiobook, am I correct?
- [62:19]
Joseph Turo
Yes. They got me, my editor asked the two previous audiobooks, I have to say, that were done for my two previous books. They got actors to do it, and they were terrible, very flat. It probably paid them very little. And so this time my wife said, why don't you get him to let you do it? So my previous book at Yale, they said, we don't do that. But my editor, who went from Yale over to Chicago now, he said, all right, sure, we can do this, as long as you have a studio where you could do it. And I had a studio at Annenberg where they have a place I could do that, plus a terrific editor, a woman named Hannah. And I was worried about my Brooklyn accent, so I sent, I send my editor an example. There's a company called 11 Labs that does different sounds of people and could read my book. I sent him an example of it and he said, I still want you to do it. So it took maybe 20 hours. It's about 10 hours and a half worth of audio. And this woman, Anna, expertly stitched together all mistakes, got rid of my mistakes and stuff like that. And I don't know, it'd be interesting to know what people think of it. You can hear a sample on Amazon
- [63:39]
Pete Kunze
if you want, and hopefully listeners will take advantage of that. Sounds like a great way to access this timely and important book.
- [63:46]
Joseph Turo
Oh, thank you.
- [63:48]
Pete Kunze
The book, again, is the Problem With Personalization, How Advertisers Learn to Make and Break Us from the Ancient Times to the AI Age. Available now from the University of Chicago Press and other online booksellers. This is Pete Kunze and this has been New Books Network. Thank you for listening and we hope you'll join us again next time.
- [64:06]
New Books Network Host
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ew booksnetwork and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.
- [64:48]
Joseph Turo
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- [65:05]
Pete Kunze
They're even coming to the castle to collect it.
- [65:08]
Joseph Turo
Tonight we feast.
- [65:12]
Wayfair Announcer / Carvana Announcer
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