Let’s Stop Targeting “Soccer Moms”
It wasn’t all that long ago when targeting pre-baked or profiled personas was the height of sophistication for most data-driven marketers. On-boarded catalog cooperatives powered what was promised to be the Magic Eight Ball of AdTech ingenuity.
This broad based and heavily modeled data was our only window into a consumer’s offline or “real-world” behavior. Back then, success was swift at the top of the funnel where large marketers could paint their brand across households with a wide, persona-driven-brush. On the other hand, at the lower end of the funnel, this same tactic couldn’t quite hit the mark for direct response or highly specific behavioral targets.
Fast forward five years and data providers are now helping marketers succeed by delivering CRM segmentation, analytics, custom audiences and predicting likely behavior based on measurable results. A good chunk of this success is a nod to higher quality data standards across the board and the move towards more deterministically matched data and the integration of data into PMPs, Header Bidding and the race to the best ID Graph.
But, part of this critical shift has been up to us, the data providers, working with marketers and agencies, helping them move away from persona-based targeting towards 1:1, people-based marketing across their desktop, mobile, devices and TV. This level of customization aimed at increasing revenue has provided unprecedented insight to measure viewability, clicks, engagement and conversions that in turn feed future models and help construct a scaffolding for marketers to build a holistic view of their customers and prospects.
This level of custom segmentation has translated into unquestionable increases in revenue across display, device, video, and social. Beyond the short-term revenue lift, these insights often jump the silo’d walls of a brand’s internal marketing channels and provide in-depth knowledge on how to best engage customers and prospects into the ever elusive omni-channel dialogue.
And, it is precisely at the point of engagement where additional custom data must be applied to ensure these audiences are triggered to act when the impression is served. So, what does all this custom offline data have to do with ad engagement you’re thinking?
A lot.
We’ve seen all too often that marketers focus all of their efforts on who to target but aren’t putting the same level of analytics behind their creative. At this final stage, if marketers aren’t using psychographic or personality-based data to optimize creative and landing pages, they’re at risk of losing up to 30% or more of the users they put so much effort into reaching.
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