With the rise of technology and the increasing number of hours that are spent on social media, targeted marketing has begun to thrive over the years. Targeted marketing is a form of advertising, including online, that is directed towards audiences with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting. These traits can either be demographic based on, economic, sex, age, the level of education, income level and employment or psychographic focused, based on consumer’s values, personality, attitudes, opinions, lifestyles and interests. Algorithms are put in place to sort this data that identifies consumers with specific needs or characteristics to match with appropriate products or brands. This sector of advertising started to grow exponentially, with an increasing potential to be in breach of the UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising and Direct & Promotional Marketing rules about harassment. Figure 7 shows how divided the opinions of the public are about this method.

In 2018 GDPR came in to, providing the biggest overhaul of data law since the data protection act of 1998. It became a legal requirement for all companies to adhere to the regulations in place or face a heavy fine, this forced marketers to relinquish a lot of their dependence on behavioural data collection. Furthermore, it directly implicated several business practices that were at the heart of digital ad targeting at that time. ‘This year, we started to see the impact of a new age of data privacy, with a number of high-profile fines being issued under the GDPR, on top of a number of incidents of media owners misusing user data. Initiatives like Intelligent Tracking Protection have sent a clear message to advertisers: data needs to be handled appropriately, and personalisation should not come at the cost of user privacy.’(Gilbert,2019) Its vital advertisers are empathetic with their audiences concern over their privacy, I want to be part of the change from invasive to useful advertising methods in my own advertising career in the future.