Devices Don’t Buy Things, People Do.

In the space of advertising technology it is easy to fall into the trap of speaking a different language. More often, the terms become so interchangeable, conflicted and confusing, even the most savvy of marketers are left overwhelmed.

It is important to come back to the role of advertising: to persuade consumers that a company’s services or products are the best, create a need, demonstrate uses, draw new customers, reinforce benefits to current customers and build the brand of the company.

When forming a strategy to consider how to best use data to target people through mobile advertising, start by thinking of the data sets as people. Think about the life events, key triggers and moments that drive decisions or behaviour. Think about people based targeting.

People based targeting offers a strategic approach to identify consumers, on their mobile device, based on a variety of attributes, behaviours and data matching. It is based on forming targeting pools around known individuals and attributes, as opposed to large sets of cookie pools. The general idea is to get away from cookie based data, and focus on what cookie based data was attempting to achieve in the first place. It was there to ensure that your ads are hitting the correct individual on the other side of the impression, regardless of device or environment.

Mobile is rarely more than 3ft away, at all times. We wake up with our mobile, and go to bed with it. As this powerful personal device goes on our daily journey, start to think about the types of content or software that is generating the data and its context.

To have an effective people based targeting strategy requires an understanding of the target audience and their behaviours. Starting with some basic assumptions from consumer insights.

For example, if you are trying to target high value customers of a credit card and know that they get coffee in the mornings and eat out 2 times a week, you might target all customers of coffee shops time targeted in the morning. In another you would target consumers that visit restaurants in the evening. After a reasonable look back window (14-days), you could analyze the performance against KPIs, and other measurement solutions to determine if both assumptions drive the desired results. Consider what day of the week you see the highest performance on coffee shop visitors and the day of the week you see the highest performance on restaurant visitors. If consistent, you could tighten the targeting parameters further to those days of the week, and customize the creative for each segment. If performance increases, start to look at other attributes such as the publisher content (site or App), carriers, device type, IP address, strongest performing geographic regions, ad formats and ad sizes. The insights, learnings and new view on this credit card’s target of high value customers is based on real-world behaviours, and real people.

Remember, your people based targeting strategy needs a story around relevance and moments. Not a sentence that includes terms such as “proprietary”, “deterministic”, “probabilistic”, “look-a-like”, “algorithm”, or “cross-screen”.

Questions about how to best leverage a people based targeting approach? Get in touch with one of our mobile experts.