Skip to main content
for

Jacob Teeny, PhD: Faculty Experts

Not seeing the results that match your search? FILTER BY CATEGORY AND FIELD

Jacob Teeny, PhD

Kellogg School of Management

Associate Professor of Marketing

About

Areas of Focus

  • Consumer psychology
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Advertising
  • Personalized persuasion
  • Social influence

Work/Research

  • Why some ads work on some people but not others
  • How AI is changing advertising
  • Personalization at scale
  • The psychology of being persuaded
  • When persuasion backfires
  • How people think about AI-generated content
  • Translating behavioral science for the public

Career

Teeny studies how people form attitudes, make decisions and respond to the messages aimed at them every day. A social psychologist by training, his recent work focuses on personalized persuasion — when, why and for whom tailored messages change minds — and how generative AI is reshaping the practice of persuasion itself. He examines how consumers react to AI-generated ads, how large language models can personalize communication at scale and how marketers and platforms can deploy these tools responsibly. Teeny is a founding member of Kellogg's Advertising Technology Lab, a partnership with Meta, and co-editor of The Handbook of Personalized Persuasion (Routledge, 2025). His research has appeared in Nature, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, PNAS and the Journal of Marketing. He was named an APS Rising Star and Poets & Quants Best 40 under 40 Business School Professors in 2026. Taken together, he is an expert on the psychology behind why personalized messages work (or backfire), how generative AI is being incorporated into advertising and what consumers actually think when they learn an ad was written by a machine.