3 ms·

Suppose it's my job to market Viagra and I'm paying for each impression. Doesn't it make sense that I would want to avoid paying for a 25 year old to see the ad

Suppose it's my job to market Viagra and I'm paying for each impression. Doesn't it make sense that I would want to avoid paying for a 25 year old to see the ad? Clearly my customer base is not 25. If I'm selling bras, I don't want to pay for a male to see the ad. The desire for relatively low-level personalization is so obvious I don't see how the author can ignore it, accuracy of the data notwithstanding. > Recently, Professor Nico Neumann partnered with the brilliant marketing team at HP to replicate this research for B2B. The results were unsurprising – but horrifying. Many enterprise technology companies spend millions of dollars ‘hyper-targeting’ IT decision makers (ITDMs) using third-party data. But if we get gender wrong more often than 50% of the time, what percentage of ITDMs do you think are actually ITDMs, according to the research? > Do you want to guess? It’s 14.3%. And for ‘senior ITDMs’, that number drops to 7.5%. > Super impressive! That’s about as precise as… a drunk monkey throwing darts? That... seems... like a great result? How many ITDMs are there in a random sample of 10,000 people? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics [0], there are 715,000 people working as IT managers in the USA. So the incidence in a random population of 10,000 is 715,000/300,000,000 = 24 people. Seems like the ads are working really well. I think it's interesting to see when you get a targeted ad you benefit from. I attended HackMIT for the first time after seeing a Facebook ad for it--I had an amazing experience at the event and that ad is possibly the reason I am a software engineer today. I doubt I would have received that ad if targeting weren't possible. If I had to put my imagination to work where ads and humans can coexist peacefully, I could imagine a world where ads are required to be hyper targeted, and you would be shown no ads unless the ad was specifically targeted to you. If the ad wasn't relevant to you, you could click an x on it to make it disappear, and the advertiser would have to pay a penalty to the host of the ad (google, facebook, whatever) for inconveniencing their users. I suppose marketers at Disney and P&G would suffer, but I am really sick of seeing liberty mutual ads when I don't even have a car. [0] https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm

_vdpp 4y ago
I’m pretty ignorant of the marketing industry, but it seems like maybe you’re lumping demographic targeting in with personalization - broad categories like age, geographic location and gender are probably good ways to target advertising. Hyper-individualized ads are just plain creepy. I’m glad to hear they’re generally ineffective at reaching their intended audience, and I’d hope that when they are effective, that the sense of invasion people feel causes them to turn the other way.
shalmanese 4y ago
That's targeting, not personalization. Personalization is that it shows you a different ad based on who they think you are. eg: Show a "Buy Viagra for yourself" ad for men and "Buy Viagra for your spouse" ad for women. The article is arguing that instead, you should just craft a "Buy Viagra for you or your spouse because of these broad based benefits of Viagra" ad that is for everyone.
- varenc 4y ago
  Expanding on that a bit more, the article isn’t advocating that marketers senselessly put up Viagra ads everywhere, but instead to “pivot to more contextually relevant and attentive channels, while working with partners who had permissioned, first-party relationships with [target customers]”. Which in this case would be something like putting ads up on a website or magazine that’s know to target an older male demographic. Or getting an older men’s health influencer on Instagram/TikTok to make a sponsored post. So still directed marketing, just not personalize on a user by user basis based on data from 3rd party brokers.
astrange 4y ago
> If I'm selling bras, I don't want to pay for a male to see the ad. That's the Victoria's Secret business model, or was, so it's not necessarily a bad idea.
- DancesWTurtles 4y ago
  It depends: are you selling bras, or are you selling the bras' brand?

_vdpp 4y ago

I’m pretty ignorant of the marketing industry, but it seems like maybe you’re lumping demographic targeting in with personalization - broad categories like age, geographic location and gender are probably good ways to target advertising. Hyper-individualized ads are just plain creepy. I’m glad to hear they’re generally ineffective at reaching their intended audience, and I’d hope that when they are effective, that the sense of invasion people feel causes them to turn the other way.

shalmanese 4y ago

That's targeting, not personalization. Personalization is that it shows you a different ad based on who they think you are. eg: Show a "Buy Viagra for yourself" ad for men and "Buy Viagra for your spouse" ad for women. The article is arguing that instead, you should just craft a "Buy Viagra for you or your spouse because of these broad based benefits of Viagra" ad that is for everyone.

varenc 4y ago
Expanding on that a bit more, the article isn’t advocating that marketers senselessly put up Viagra ads everywhere, but instead to “pivot to more contextually relevant and attentive channels, while working with partners who had permissioned, first-party relationships with [target customers]”. Which in this case would be something like putting ads up on a website or magazine that’s know to target an older male demographic. Or getting an older men’s health influencer on Instagram/TikTok to make a sponsored post. So still directed marketing, just not personalize on a user by user basis based on data from 3rd party brokers.

astrange 4y ago

> If I'm selling bras, I don't want to pay for a male to see the ad. That's the Victoria's Secret business model, or was, so it's not necessarily a bad idea.

DancesWTurtles 4y ago
It depends: are you selling bras, or are you selling the bras' brand?