By Jonny Whitehead, Strategy Director, and Ben Wilkins, Product Director, at Skyrise
Okay, it may be a stretch to compare the current era of digital advertising with the period of European history which saw the rise of humanism, countless artistic and scientific advancements and a new age of exploration and discovery, however, there is a Renaissance happening in audience targeting that is fast redefining the landscape of media planning and buying.
For those marketers still optimising their campaigns to digital attribution metrics, audiences have lost their strategic importance.
The responsibility for understanding who their audience is has been outsourced to global tech companies who operate without transparency and prioritise their own interests.
In this digitally-attributed world, rather than being the cornerstone of campaign objectives, groups of cookies, IDs, or ‘audiences’ are tested against each other as mere campaign line items to see which generate the most pixel fires.
However, just as the Renaissance ushered in a new era of knowledge and enlightenment, post-digital attribution opens up new opportunities for marketers to apply their expertise with a new set of tools, data, and techniques. A modern way of thinking for modern marketing.
This modern approach allows for the design of audience strategies and campaigns with transparent data sets that quantify media opportunities more precisely.
But the most powerful side-effect is that by doing so, by breaking the habit of click-based metrics and thinking differently marketers can understand true effectiveness, elevating audience building to a central and strategic role in their campaigns.
This renewed focus bridges the gap from opaque, tech-driven metrics to a more strategic and ultimately, more effective, approach to media planning.
This is not simply audience targeting by tick box, this is audience design.
Effective audience design
Even the most well-designed audiences won’t be naturally effective as strategies to plan, buy and measure media campaigns.
To begin with, they need to be shaped into segments that are primed to tap into pockets of demand for the product or service you’re offering.
And then the final strategy must be optimised for reach and impact – where your audience can be reached and how can they be impacted most efficiently, leveraging the power of programmatic targeting across each media channel.
At Skyrise, we believe Effective Audience Design is the combination of three elements:
- Audience profiling
- Market opportunity
- Media availability
Audience profiling
The aim of audience profiling is to understand the prospective audience by their:
- Size
- Demographics
- Interests
- Media consumption
- Geographic distribution
To do this with conviction, marketers must trust the data they’re analysing to not only accurately describe the audience but also have complete confidence in its representativeness with regard to the population universe.
Often data providers will use data points that are unrepresentative to describe audiences or total populations.
For example, take the data derived from location signals from the user of a transport app aimed at young people not only are the users demographically unrepresentative of the total population, the location signals are biased towards environments where the app is being used, e.g. rail stations.
To make data from this sample more representative, the data provider will estimate the percentage of the population in the apps’ audience versus the national average and extrapolate accordingly.
This type of modelling leads to low-fidelity data outcomes, whereby the end-product seen by the downstream consumer of the data is a far cry from the original signals used to generate it. These processes lead to mass generalisation and a loss of acuity, rendering the outputs much less powerful than high-fidelity options that do not require such tampering.
For the most effective campaign outcomes, and for marketers to trust the foundations on which they’re making investments of valuable advertising budget, audiences or personas should be tailored to the client and brief. Taxonomies should be clear and communicable, as should the processes used to generate lookalike audience models.
Market opportunity
Brands, campaigns and audiences do not exist in a vacuum. Competitor activity and shifting demand create a dynamic environment that presents both threats and opportunities.
By analysing existing brand engagement against their competitive set, brands can identify where there is the best prospect of market share gain, and where competitive behaviour is at its most intense.
Overlaying audience data on top of market intelligence can help pinpoint where to prioritise budget or help portfolio brands to manage overlap of messaging or cannibalisation.
For example; by analysing engagement with competitor sites and apps versus engagement with their own, brands can understand where there is market share to be gained and increase marketing effort in response.
The use of CRM data can lend a view of longer term profitability or conversion through the funnel. Carrying out these analysis over time allows marketers to understand changes in demand and react to where the rate of change is at its greatest.
Media availability
A particular cookie or ID-based audience might well have come from a reputable source and it might perfectly describe the audience or behaviour an advertiser wants to target.
However if the media placements linked to that audience lack sufficient reach or impact, it is doomed to be ineffectual.
To be effective, audience design needs to link into a broad-ranging, sophisticated view of media touchpoints. Opportunities to reach the audience need to be quantified and evaluated for effectiveness prior to going live. To do this, an effective audience design platform needs to understand the core parameters of reach, frequency and audience efficiency across available channels.
Buying media programmatically in conjunction with an effective audience design platform offers marketers and planners the opportunity to calculate and increase the percentage of ad impressions delivered to an audience they actually care about. Far more effective than reaching a generic, appealingly-named segment with mysterious origins.
Marketers deserve better
Now that it’s clear individual digital identifiers give partial and misleading answers, marketers who care about the effectiveness of campaigns across channels and platforms won’t be satisfied with pressing a button and expecting everything to ‘work’. They deserve better.
Effective audience design with reliable audience profiling, market intelligence and media opportunity analysis gives marketers and planners a framework to make confident and effective investment decisions in a world with a broken ID landscape.
Like the artists, inventors and explorers of the Renaissance, today’s marketers have the opportunity to shape a new era of digital advertising through the lens of Effective Audience Design.
Rediscovering knowledge that, with new technology, can outshine what came before.
