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Against Opacity: Explainable AI and Large Language Models for Effective Digital Advertising

Published: 27 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

The opaqueness of modern digital advertising, exemplified by platforms such as Meta Ads, raises concerns regarding their autonomous control over audience targeting, pricing structures, and ad relevancy assessments. Locked in their leading positions by network effects, "Metas and Googles of the world" attract countless advertisers who rely on intuition, with billions of dollars lost on ineffective social media ads. The platforms' algorithms use huge amounts of data unavailable to advertisers, and the algorithms themselves are opaque as well. This lack of transparency hinders the advertisers' ability to make informed decisions and necessitates efforts to promote transparency, standardize industry metrics, and strengthen regulatory frameworks. In this work, we propose novel ways to assist marketers in optimizing their advertising strategies via machine learning techniques designed to analyze and evaluate content, in particular, predict the click-through rates (CTR) of novel advertising content. Another important problem is that large volumes of data available in the competitive landscape, e.g., competitors' ads, impede the ability of marketers to derive meaningful insights. This leads to a pressing need for a novel approach that would allow us to summarize and comprehend complex data. Inspired by the success of ChatGPT in bridging the gap between large language models (LLMs) and a broader non-technical audience, we propose a novel system that facilitates marketers in data interpretation, called SODA, that merges LLMs with explainable AI, enabling better human-AI collaboration with an emphasis on the domain of digital marketing and advertising. By combining LLMs and explainability features, in particular modern text-image models, we aim to improve the synergy between human marketers and AI systems.

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cover image ACM Conferences
MM '23: Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia
October 2023
9913 pages
ISBN:9798400701085
DOI:10.1145/3581783
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 27 October 2023

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Author Tags

  1. ads performance prediction
  2. deep learning
  3. digital advertising
  4. explainable ai
  5. large language model

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MM '23
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MM '23: The 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia
October 29 - November 3, 2023
Ottawa ON, Canada

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View all
  • (2025)Explainable Video Topics for Content Taxonomy: A Multimodal Retrieval Approach to Industry-Compliant Contextual AdvertisingIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2025.354256213(30597-30612)Online publication date: 2025
  • (2025)Explainable AI Chatbots Towards XAI ChatGPT: A ReviewHeliyon10.1016/j.heliyon.2025.e42077(e42077)Online publication date: Jan-2025
  • (2024)Beyond Words: On Large Language Models Actionability in Mission-Critical Risk AnalysisProceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3674805.3695401(517-527)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Looking Through the Deep Glasses: How Large Language Models Enhance Explainability of Deep Learning ModelsProceedings of Mensch und Computer 202410.1145/3670653.3677488(566-570)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
  • (2024)AI-Driven Contextual Advertising: Toward Relevant Messaging Without Personal DataJournal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising10.1080/10641734.2024.233493945:3(301-319)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024

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