• by Ted McConnell , Featured Contributor, July 8, 2016

To quickly review 30 years of advertising history: Targeting was sloppy. Then, it was better. Now, maybe, it’s too good?

I heard a complaint from a CPG leader yesterday. It goes like this: Seems like broad reach works pretty well. Maybe this surgical targeting stuff (with online) is a waste of money. Maybe we should just go back to TV.

Upfront results this year suggest that sentiment is not unique.  

Brands are questioning whether digital, with its amazing accuracy, is a problem rather than a solution. Has digital over-sold its unique power, or is it just that brands, lacking healthy growth, long for the halcyon days when they grew like weeds, and TV was the medium that mattered most?

Probably, overzealousness regarding digital is coming home to roost, and promises of miraculous media seem hollow in the wake of tepid brand performance. I actually heard this from an advertiser: If digital is so good, and we are spending more on it, why isn’t our brand growing? I think we all know there are a lot of reasons not related to media choices, so as usual, it’s a matter of injecting some balance.

First, don’t blame the tools.

One thing many people believe is this: For every product and goal, there are better and worse ways to use each medium.  “narrow vs. broad” targeting is fair but incomplete, and has been the subject of endless research. 

From a 2011 Ehrenberg-Bass report: “Be careful not to fall into the common trap of setting a media target based on a narrow target buyer definition, as this ignores the majority of buyers, who cumulatively represent large profits and substantial growth opportunities. Setting a narrow target market will give the deceiving impression that big reach media are wasteful (as they reach many people outside of the narrow target). Narrow targets damage brands as they direct media buyers towards high cost, low reach niche media.”

Could it be that the typical ultra-detailed online target specification is often broken? Maybe excellent delivery makes things worse! Or is it just that on the occasions when TV hits the mark, it hits hard enough to make a difference?

Probably both things are true. The research underlying online target specifications seems to thrive on precision, but TV is so powerful as a medium that when it works, it really works. I guess big reach + big screen is a formula that, more than anything else, maximizes luck!

There are, nonetheless, a few things a brand might try by way of adjusting their targeting strategies before throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  

One is to relax online targeting. It’s common to relax online targeting by expanding essential elements that suggest affinity for the category. In practice, relaxing accuracy to a specific target is very different from intentionally expanding the domain of promising possibilities.  Many campaigns do the former because it’s easy, but the latter is a much stronger idea.  

TV, on the other hand, can be improved by restricting targeting.  Indexing can be used in several kinds of ways to reduce waste and improve targeting accuracy. Addressable TV (which can be “programmatic” or not) is another way to get big-screen lean-back impact with relatively perfect delivery.

To blame targeting for the failure of a medium is like blaming rack and pinion steering for driving to the wrong destination. Similarly, to suggest that TV is better because of its broad (i.e. fuzzy) targeting ignores the essential truths about why TV works. By now most media people know all this. But for some reason, some advertisers seem to prefer the comfort of easy-to-measure silos over the common sense of total audience and net impact.  

Either way, you won’t learn much about what really worked (or not) unless you know whom you were talking to in the first place.