Saleem Alhabash

Wired | 2018-04-25

Facebook marketers rarely however stick to one category to target you. To identify an audience who will engage with a specific advertisement, marketers need to know how to best combine these categories.

“Interest doesn’t mean you like the topic, it just means you keep looking at it or something like that,” says Content Harmony's Jamison. A user might, for example, show an interest in Donald Trump, but it doesn’t mean they like the president, it just means they read stories related to him. To target people who genuinely like Trump, marketers would need to combine an interest in him with another category. But users don't always know how these combinations happen, or why, making it difficult to know the exact reasons you may be seeing an ad targeted to you. Facebook does allow you to click the three dots in the corner of any advertisement and view some information about why you're seeing it, but it's difficult to get a clear picture.

"Whatever information goes into sense-making about an individual and grouping people into different groups and segments is much more than demographic," says Saleem Alhabash, a professor at Michigan State University and the co-director of its Media and Advertising Psychology Lab. "It's the things you interact with, every URL you click on—not only on Facebook but elsewhere on the internet—also how you interact with your friends, all of this gets muddled into making sense of you and providing you with relevant ads."

Yahoo | 2017-05-02

Saleem Alhabash, Ph.D, an assistant professor of public relations and social media at Michigan State University, agrees, telling Yahoo Beauty that this kind of technology has the potential to be more effective at targeting people than self-reported measures, like surveys, which are subject to dishonesty.

“From an advertising/marketing perspective, knowing the emotional state the consumers are experiencing is essential to learning more about them, but more importantly, it is critical for making sense of which type of messages and appeals might be effective when consumers are experiencing such emotions,” he says.

Christian Science Monitor | 2017-04-13

On Wednesday, a Burger King television ad likely became the first ever to intentionally trigger smart devices like Google Home and Android phones.

The response to the new ad highlights many of the concerns associated with privacy and security concerns in an increasingly digital world. But while this might be the first ad to target users who already own a Google Home or other listening smart device, privacy-invading strategies companies use to target customers are nothing new, says Saleem Alhabash, a professor of Public Relations and Social Media at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Mich.

"Behavioral targeting has been applied for quite some time now," Dr. Alhabash tells The Christian Science Monitor in an email. "Advertisers, including Google, have been recording our digital traces and through algorithmic manipulation, providing us with tailored ads that are more meaningful to us."

The State News | 2017-02-06

Epling has teamed up with assistant professor in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations Saleem Alhabash to continue his work on preventing bullying. Alhabash has spent three to four years researching the effects of bullying with a focus on cyberbullying among college students.

“Most of the focus, when we talk about bullying and cyberbullying, centers around school age populations so kids in high school, middle school, this is where a lot of emphasis is about,” Alhabash said. “Somehow we think that when people graduate high school and become college students, magically the bullying and cyberbullying stop.”...