Editorial Articles

Cutting through the world of online targeting isn’t necessarily easy. The combination of data and technology has opened up endless possibilities for display advertisers who want to refine their targeting. It includes geo-targeting based on location; demographic targeting, built around key traits including age and gender; or retargeting a site visitor when they appear elsewhere online. And these represent just a few.

Add to that media strategies that revolve around buying content or environment and it’s easy to get caught up in talking about ‘where’ and ‘how’ rather than considering the ‘who’. Of course in truth it isn’t geographies or demographics that buy products and services, it’s people. What’s more, people are complex and targeting decisions need to be based on very relevant, timely information as buying decisions have different windows of consideration, depending on what the product or service is.

Consider this. Does being aged 18-30 make you a good candidate for European flights? How about searching around the term ‘Spain’, or browsing multiple newspaper articles about Seville? In actual fact none of these in isolation says enough about you to suggest you are planning a European holiday abroad. In fact they could easily be misinterpreted leading to wasted spend and irrelevant communications.

However, put them all together and you start creating a realistic picture of someone who is a good candidate for a specific travel offer. Think of targeting like a jigsaw puzzle; too few pieces and you don’t know what you’re looking at; but with enough pieces on the board you start creating a meaningful picture. Online targeting is just the same. You can’t base an audience on a single dimension, it’s not sufficient: unique audiences have to be derived from collating, refining and interrogating insights from multiple online insights – content read, searches made, actions taken, sites/sections/pages visited - offline data, data from advertisers and any other relevant information.

While traditionally this integration of information and data has been difficult, the emergence of new technologies, such as Audience Targeting Platforms, are now creating an exciting new world for online marketers. They take data from any perspective – be it contextual, demographic, transactional, response, behavioural or lifestyle – on or offline. And by aggregating thousands of different data sources, Audience Targeting Platforms provide a dynamic space, with scale, in which publishers and advertisers can create unique audiences for digital advertising. At a time when the industry has more data and more inventory than ever before at its disposal, Audience Targeting Platforms are the next logical step forward, bringing an ability to create effective solutions and better performing digital campaigns. AudienceScience’s technology leads the market in this respect providing an integrated platform that houses people’s interests and behaviours (but nothing that is personally identifiable) in millions of pieces of data that are analysed and can be clustered into key audience segments.

In short, they mean that publishers and advertisers can have the best of all worlds. While content and context is still important for targeting, the ability to target online around audience adds a whole new dimension. Good news all round in fact because now you can have your cake (or cookie) and eat it!

Stuart Colman
Managing Director UK, AudienceScience