Commentary
The Future is Targeting
- by Rob Graham , September 4, 2012
Not that long ago, the presumed foundation of any successful advertising campaign was based on the principles of reach and frequency – namely, get a message in front of as many people as you can as often as possible and your work was done. These mass media campaigns focus on bombarding consumers with brand message at all turns in order to get brand awareness and market exposure.
While reach and frequency focused campaigns may be effective for some branding efforts, the “shotgun” approach they employ is generally wasteful in terms of time, resources and money because, apart from reaching consumers who may find a message relevant and meaningful, there is also generally a huge percentage that do not.
Digital media channels offer an unprecedented opportunity for marketers to more accurately target audiences and to match brand and campaign messaging with individual consumers who not only will find a message personally relevant but will be more likely to convert. By identifying offer specific targeting criteria, marketers and advertisers can home in on just those points of behavior. This means that an advertiser looking to sell cat food can look for online consumers whose behaviors and areas of interest indicate cat ownership instead of targeting ‘everybody’ simply because they have a pulse.
Audience targeting is still in its relative infancy. However, we are already seeing a significant increase in online advertising that is reaching consumers with the right message at the right time and in a meaningful way. I predict that before long ALL advertising will be based on using specific targeting criteria to reach the right person as well.
Rob Spider Graham, Training Craft
Reaching right consumer with rithe message
https://sites.google.com/site/cuoirent/home
Behavioral Based Social Media System for the Cable TV Market
Cable has long history of failing to develop 1-1 target marketing, the Holy Grail of targeted advertising.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/03/the-56-billion-ad-question/
Excerpt from above link on January, 2011 Fortune.com –
“Advertisers will spend $56 billion putting ads on TV this year,...The cable industry thought it would be a big opportunity too, but its efforts have fallen short.
http://www.businessinsider.com/jason-kilar-here-are-my-thoughts-on-hulu-and-the-future-of-tv-2011-2
Excerpt from above link on February, 2011 Business Insider
Identifies advertising market being missed by Cable TV operators
In the near future, advertisers will demand the ability to target their messages to people rather than targeting their messages to TV shows as proxies for people.”
The obvious alternative, with the least cost to implement is an independent Cloud CRM solution designed to cross index cable subscriber households with their corresponding social network interests. The current regulatory and privacy issues experienced by cable TV operators gathering unauthorized data from set-top boxes could be minimized, by validating subscriber and even eliminated by essentially having an opt-in plan (provided conveniently by the social media). Access along with profile and interests of households would be controlled by the subscriber’s social media platform of choice. Facebook has high consumer acceptance and could be used for household profiles, product interests, social interests, and viewing entertainment interests. There would be incentives to the subscribers to opt-in including notification and reminder of viewing favorites, Groupon type ads, and specific ads matching interests with infomercial type group discounts and urgency to buy.
The current design of target marketing advertising ventures is fundamentally flawed. They focus on demographics, and fail to identify the individual behavioral current and future household interests.
I would propose using a data cross indexing similar to a data warehouse project I was involved with at iN Demand. http://www.indemand.com/ .
Project would involve developing a bidirectional Cloud interface program using a CRM application between the social media and MSO subscriber records and communicating behavioral marketing - business advertising, discounts, specific videos/groups, family albums – providing subscriber awareness of TV programming -- movies, products, etc. similar to Amazon and Groupon. This would make subscriber stickier and substantially reduce turnover.
To paraphrase a comment I made in the CED 1999 publication about the Internet, cable TV operators need to become the new best friends with the 600 million members of social media.