InteracTiVoty: 21st Century Targeting: Behaviors, not Demographics - Todd Juenger - MediaBizBloggers

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It's a strange feeling writing a blog, wondering who is taking a few minutes of their valuable time to read your thoughts, and what kind of reaction it will provoke, if any. Last month, I got the most precious thing one could wish for – a posted response.

Quick summary, last month I wrote a piece on the "last gasp" of relevance for age/sex demos, arguing it is better to precisely measure the size of the audience for an advertising message and project the characteristics of that audience, rather than start with a small group of (presumably) precisely known audience characteristics and project a highly imprecise total audience. I cited Internet search as the perfect case example; the total audience is perfectly measureable but no one cares about demographics. A reader, posting under the name "Kyle," took issue with my arguments, using the example of a video game, saying it's preposterous not to care about demographics, if you know a M18-34 is five times more likely to purchase the product than a F18-34, how can you ignore that?

Kyle raises a terrific point. What I think we have here is confusion between Planning and Measurement. Of course a brand should make smart media placement choices that will best reach the most likely potential consumers of the product. Historically, this has been accomplished through age/sex demographics. Nothing better existed, and the whole media marketplace developed around measurement and buying/selling of age/sex demos. But all along, the demos were nothing more than a proxy for audience characteristics brand managers really cared about.

I can speak with a little bit of authority on this. I started my career in brand management at P&G, in the laundry category. The biggest part of my job was trying to understand laundry habits and how consumers make decisions. We developed robust segmentations of consumers based on these factors. But when we went to plan our media, we were relegated to buying against F18-54. What a poor proxy. How much more efficient would it have been to be able to target consumer segments we cared about, based on attitudes and behaviors we knew would drive their reception of advertising messages and the role various elements played in their decision-making?

Back to the video game example: while M18-34 may be five times more likely than F18-34 to purchase the product, I guarantee there are household factors with even more powerful correlations. How about presence of the video game console in the household? Past purchase of video games on this platform? Genre-specific past purchases or cross-category indicators of interest (e.g. if it's a Madden football game, does the household watch football? And own a video game platform? And purchase other similar video games in the past? What other predictors does the brand have to predict propensity for a household to move into this category in the future?). All of this is knowable today, using set-top-box data tied to panels of viewers and/or matched purchase data, which ties together household behaviors with television consumption.

Using a hypothetical example from TiVo's "True Targets" product (which uses an opt-in panel of 35,000 households with set-top-box data and survey responses), imagine you are managing a political campaign and you're trying to reach Democrats or Republicans. Age/sex demos wouldn't tell you very much. But True Targets tells us television consumption (of programs and commercials) for Democrats and Republicans (large samples, passively observed). If you're trying to reach Democrats, a smart choice might be Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List, which in primetime for the broadcast month of June, original episode airings, had a 6.8 TiVo household rating among Democrats, versus a 4.4 rating among A18-49. So you could pay for 4.4 ratings points and reach 6.8 ratings points of your target. Now that's efficiency! (To reach Republicans, a smart choice might be Ice Road Truckers, which delivered 3.0 among Republicans versus a 1.9 among A18-49).

After planning your campaign, and executing the buy using the only available inventory in the marketplace, i.e. C3 currency against age/sex demos, I would argue the best way to assess media efficiency would be to use set-top-box data to measure the specific audience for your commercials (overall), and use something like the True Targets product to understand the composition of that audience. Finally, of course, judge the marketplace results, and build those back into the continuous loop learning cycle of how creative, media, and weight combine to drive real-world actions.

In the meantime, between my day job and writing blogs, I'll continue with my regular life in which as a 42-year-old male, I am the primary decision maker on laundry products for my household.

Todd Juenger is VP and General Manager, Audience Research and Measurement for TiVo, Inc.

Read all Todd’s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at InteracTiVoty - MediaBizBloggers.

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