• by Joe Marchese , July 17, 2007

Statement: Digital media advertising technologies will allow for unprecedented targeting. Question: Targeting of what and to what end? It's true that these technologies are improving daily in their ability to refine targeting based on context and consumer's behavioral data, but targeting can only serve to improve advertising's effectiveness when combined with an advertising plan that fully accounts for the abilities and limitations of targeting technologies. In the end, the key to unlocking targeting's potential lies in the ability for advertisers to create targeting's necessary counterpart, relevancy.

To form an advertising plan that fully leverages improving targeting technologies, advertisers must ask a number of questions. The first are: Why am I targeting? What is success? I am fairly certain the only metric that really matters is an advertiser's ability to sell more products while maintaining margins reflecting that advertiser's perceived brand premium. The difference in strategy lies in whether advertisers measure success in the short or long run, and/or whether they measure success as simply increasing sales volume or increasing brand equity to increase sales margins and product life cycles. Making these decisions has always affected the execution of offline marketing, yet we consistently fail to apply this type of thinking to digital advertising targeting strategies. By evaluating these goals, digital advertisers can determine if success is measured in views, clicks, online purchases, or some other measure more in line with traditional advertising goals.

Next, in order to evaluate digital media targeting strategies to achieve internally defined measures of success, advertisers must ask: What am I targeting? Targeting the people viewing an advertising opportunity (behavioral and demographic targeting) is very different from targeting the context of the message surrounding an advertising opportunity. Optimizing for targeting people requires creating a personally relevant independent advertising message, as context surrounding the advertisement will likely vary. Whereas, targeting context requires creating a more simple contextually relevant message that can "borrow" the message of the surrounding content to help convey the advertiser's message.

Ideally advertisers can take a hybrid approach to targeting and utilize both contextual and personalized targeting. However, as advertisers begin to layer on levels of targeting, the two greatest weakness targeting are exposed; lack of scalability with regards to message creation, and lack of advertiser clairvoyance.

Addressing advertiser's lack of clairvoyance first: How many times have you heard advertisers tell a story about how they thought they knew exactly who their target market was, only to be surprised? Or an advertiser that was convinced that its brand message was X, only to find out that the market perceived its brand message as Y? In short, over-targeting can cause advertisers to miss opportunities in a medium that should be providing marketers with unparalleled feedback on how people actually perceive their brand, and new ways to adjust messaging to capitalize on this dialogue.

The scalability issue of creating relevant messaging as advertisers utilize increasingly refined targeting technology is perhaps the most daunting. Targeting a "market of one" is certainly a great concept, but if you have a product with broad appeal, creating millions of marketing messages can be a bit prohibitive. Even creating 10 to 20 quality messages for a single campaign can be difficult, especially when the most effective campaigns will be reactive to dialogue with consumers echoing their perception of your brand back at you. There are some interesting experimental solutions to this issue such as modular ad creation and dynamic ad display. I personally feel that some form of distributed creative development will play an integral role in solving scalability issues.

Targeting's real limitation in its current state is that digital media has yet to fully quantify/qualify what is available for targeting. Part of the onus for correcting this lies in the hands of publishers. Publishers must realize that they are not "selling their audience." We have all had the discussions regarding the death of push advertising, yet publishers are forced to sell in a market that still behaves very much like a broadcast advertising market. Targeting and relevancy unlock the potential for QUALITY publishers (from individuals to professional media producers) to sell so much more than the attention of their audience and advertisers in order to build effective targeting strategies, offering so much more than just a demographic mix. But publishers must do a better job of defining what their true value is to advertisers and help advertisers to create greater relevance to the publisher's content and audience alike.

Understanding the limitation of not being able to target on the true value of digital media (especially for brand advertisers) can create significant opportunity for those advertisers who can best glue together current targeting technologies to execute on a strategy of tapping undervalued digital advertising opportunities for their brands.