Contextual
The
use of the word contextual is fairly new, but the practice has been in place forever. It is common to run schedules in endemic media. Beauty products in Glamour. Music in Rolling Stone, etc. On the
web, there is a lot of contextually appropriate content that is not obvious from the title of the site. Networks and site can leverage their technology to ensure not only that you are in the
contextually appropriate place, there is technology from companies like ClickFacts who can ensure that you don't run in places you don't want to be in.
Behavioral
A big deal on the Web. This is the ability to track what someone has been doing and serve up the appropriate ad. Advantage: you get advertising that is relevant to
what consumers have been looking at on the Web. Disadvantage: It is all based on history and consumers may have already solved that problem and moved on. Still, research from Tacoda and others shows
that behavioral targeting works.
Relevancy
This is my own term for what Quantcast has been talking about. (I considered calling it propinquity, but thought that too
esoteric). Given that they have the ability to identify the people coming to a page of a Web site and find those people (and those like them) within inventory on the Web, media buyers and sellers hope
to facilitate buys using this type of targeting in the next year. We're already tagging out client campaigns and finding out the difference between those in the publisher audience we thought we
bought, vs. those who are actually served ads on the publisher site, vs. those who engage with our client's ads (wouldn't you like to know the demographic difference of those who click through
vs. those who view through?) and those who actually perform an action on the site.
Social
This is another "next big thing." Turns out that the power of
social media like Facebook, MySpace and others may not be in the pages but in the connectivity. In 2009, we expect a number of contenders to roll out that will take advantage of this connectivity.
Think of it as a "birds of a feather" approach. If you know that certain people are in your target, and you could identify people who had multiple connections to your known target, why
wouldn't you want to reach out to them in your advertising, too?
There are other tools, of course. Geographic overlays are one. You can combine geography with almost any kind of
targeting. Another is retargeting vs. those who have visited your site but not bought. This has proven to be most effective.
Whatever methods you are using, make it conscious at the plan
level, rather than just being sold whatever targeting the seller has come up with. Targeting can take you a long way toward success in ROI.
interesting just how critical it is to know all this when using the Web and how totally inaccurate the reality is from the effort to make it real.
live events is a much more accurate, specific, exacting means of gettting the return for any form of results targeting you seek.
Your basics of targeting are basic rules in advertising since the beginning of advertising. Now there are more communications means to the sales, i.e., profit ends. We always need to reminded so we don't slip off target. Don't stop targeting our needs.
One more thing to add: Translation of targeting. Just last evening I bought an item on line for a 13 year old young man as a holiday/birthday gift. There is a 99.999% chance I will never buy anything else on that sight (nothing wrong with their site or products, just not ever for me or special for anything else). Now, they are spending their hard earned money to invest to target me on my email account. It is non-offensive advertising, but this is all waste. Even to the next step...if I ever was looking for a particular item, I would search for the item rather than the advertiser's business as that is how I found their business in the first place. No doubt, I am not alone.
Dave, time to include Semantic Targeting on this list. You'll be hearing a lot more about Semantic over the next few quarters as there are several companies that have begun to deliver on the promise (insert shameless self-promo here). It moves beyond contextual and keyword targeting by looking at the whole page meaning and helps mitigate some of the awkward matches that contextual targeting can sometimes provide. Unlike Behavioral it doesn't target IP addresses so no mismatch on shared computers, etc.