With audience-based buying you can share the message they care about
Walk into any office with female employees ages 25-49, and you’ll find a variety of characters, desires, challenges, lifestyles, and political views. Yet when it’s time to buy TV spots, some advertisers still assume information about viewer age and gender is all that they need to achieve qualified impressions.
Another faulty assumption is the homogeneity of a network's audience. The presumption is that History Channel fans are not the same people – or even the same type of people – as reality TV fans. Therefore, the conclusion certain advertisers draw is that the two audiences need to be presented with vastly different products. Concurrently, they assume that viewers who watch the same type of shows would benefit from the same time of product.
Advertisers can do better now. If you can find multiple needs in a group of 25-49 year old female colleagues working in the same office, won’t you find exponentially more differences in a group of a 78 million households?
If you want to increase your target impressions – especially those of qualified viewers – you need to dig deeper into the data.
Target Granular Geographies
A restaurant chain wanted to target women ages 25-49 throughout the country. That’s a target audience of 97 million women. But only 11 million lived within a 5 mile radius of restaurant locations. Research showed that targeting the entire country would only expose 12% of the women who live close to the restaurants’ messages. The majority of commercials would be presented to women who live too far away to frequent the chain.
By going with a Targeted TV campaign, 88% of wasted impressions were recaptured. Read more here.
Use First Party Data
In today’s commercial environment, companies collect data about their customers everywhere through social signals and online behavior analysis.
Brands know what their customers buy, how much and how often they buy, how loyal they are to a brand, if they prefer shopping online or offline, what they look for, what they talk about on social media, what kind of promotions they respond to best, and what kind of formats they relate to most.
Commercial chains that carry consumer credit cards as fan loyalty programs can even track what their customers are buying in other stores, and therefore collect additional data.
Clearly, not all women 25-49 react the same to brand messages, have the same taste in cars, or buy the same products at a grocery store. First party data enables companies and advertisers to segment their audience, and increase qualified impressions by only targeting the relevant segment – just as they would with geography.
Dig Deep Into Psychographics
Consumers are no longer willing to sit through countless irrelevant messages. If past viewers went to the kitchen or changed channels during commercial breaks, today’s viewers are constantly plugged into 2-5 devices, which means they have a lot more options to help you waste your hard earned budgets.
Today’s consumers will listen to you, but only if you make the effort to share messages they care about. As digital adapters and digital natives, they expect you to do your research before you approach them.
Cambridge Analytica, for example, has collected up to 5,000 data points about more than 220 million Americans. Their innovative OCEAN psychographics model scales personality traits data.
- Openness to new experiences
- Conscientiousness and preference to organize and plan
- Extroversion and enjoying spending time with others
- Agreeableness and putting other people’s needs first
- Neurosis and tendency to worry
According to Cambridge Analytica, just because two women are around 30 years old, use AMEX, and watch The Good Wife or Shark Tank doesn’t mean they’ll respond to the same messages. One could be all about socializing and partying, while the other prefers building the businesses of the future.
Similarly, people from different demographics group might share the same personality traits, and therefore similarly respond to your car advertisement. Find those people within a reasonable radius of your client’s stores, tap into first party data, then add a layer of psychographics to drill it down further, and see an exponential increase in your qualified impressions reach.
Analyze and Compare Media Value
Once advertisers understand their target audience, it’s time to go shopping for time slots.
Now advertisers who want to get the biggest return on their investment can take the time to compare national broadcast, network, spot broadcast stations, and spot cable delivery. We can tell you what impact each one will have on your audience. Advancements in technology make it easier and faster than ever to compare CPMs (cost per thousand impressions).
What if I Don’t Have Access to All these Data Points?
With so many advertisers still relying on twentieth century information models of age, gender and TV watching habits, many feel they’re behind and can’t catch up. But if that’s you, don’t give up.
We make it simple. A single address or multiple locations are all we need to provide you with insights. Or just two columns on an Excel sheet are all you need: ZIP codes nearby and any previous clients from each. We'll tell you all about your media options and the audiences within them.
You can catch up to the data-driven world, which could help you increase not only impressions, but qualified TV impressions that can actually convert.
Sound off below in the comments and let us know if and how you think advertisers are missing the boat on targeting demographics!
