Technical innovation is what drives the digital industry feeding a frenzy of growth and fragmentation. Every week we hear about developments or product enhancements that make digital advertising better, faster or more engaging, all of which present both opportunities and new complexities for marketers, advertisers, agencies and publishers alike.
It all used to be so simple: buyers (whether advertisers or agencies), sellers (publishers) and, to help both parties as things began to become fragmented, ad networks (the middlemen).
Today, the marketplace is more crowded than ever and the options more diverse. The industry is going through a huge technology evolution and we’ve seen the emergence of brand new offerings like yield optimisers, Demand Side Platforms (DSP) and data exchanges. In short the digital marketplace is fast creating a dynamic ecosystem of its own encompassing an ever-growing range of advanced services and technologies.
Within this ecosystem, data now plays what is perhaps the most crucial role of all. Its ability to create precisely defined audiences, based on a huge wealth of audience attributes, is now recognised as the foundation for effective digital campaigns. Yet despite its key role, data targeting platforms aren’t yet represented on the digital map and, as a result, the inherent value they bring to the marketplace is sometimes missed.
The Emergence of Audience Targeting Platforms
Data fuels every part of the new online advertising ecosystem and the real challenge is how to understand, organise, manipulate and employ it. Audience Targeting Platforms drive real value by bringing together behavioural, contextual, demographic and dynamic data into a single cohesive targeting platform that can create sophisticated new solutions for ad buyers aned sellers alike. They empower marketers to:
- Aggregate multiple online and offline data sources
- Provide a single platform to control and manage the data
- Transparently define and build precise audiences
- Connect audiences and inventory across multiple buying and selling points
- Employ campaign insights to optimise and refine targeting
- Provide control, transparency and reproducibility
All these elements must seamlessly integrate through a platform that is straightforward to implement and use.
The Components of an Audience Targeting Platform
1. Aggregate multiple online and offline data sources on a single platform to control and manage the data
Targeting is the most crucial element of any campaign and requires intelligence and insight built on granular data. However, internal audience data is typically siloed across different areas of a business, by channel, product line or by brand, reducing the effectiveness of targeting because it is basing decisions on limited information.
An Audience Targeting Platform ‘joins the data dots’ by collecting, importing and collating huge volumes of data – online, offline, internal, third party etc. - centrally on a single platform. This enables raw data to be transformed into actionable information.
2. Transparently define and build precise audiences
Targeting is about defining who you want to reach and then facilitating a way to do this quickly, simply and accurately. You need to define your audience explicitly then apply logic to control, refine and manipulate data to build a universe of relevant contact points.
A key component to audience definition is having the tools to transparently understand how a target segment has been built and which audience attrbutes it comprises.. Too often there is a reliance on unseen ‘black box’ solutions, with little known about what data is driving them and how they really work.
3. Connect audiences and inventory across multiple buying and selling points
We operate in a multi-channel/multi partnership/multi-platform environment so it is essential that any audience can be shared and used with your different partners. At the same time, such a platform needs to offer total control as to who has access and use of any segment.
4. Employ campaign insights to drive optimisation and targeting refinement
Any audience platform needs to offer analytical tools to provide a granularity of intelligence that can fine tune audience targeting. Without it, you’ll never know why one campaign segment outperformed the next and lose the opportunity to effectively improve results throughout the course of a single campaign. Inbuilt analytics enable users to understand and refine the key data drivers that comprise any single audience, in real time, in order to optimise campaign performance.
5. Provide Control, Transparency and Reproducibility
When working with multiple parties the concept of ‘target audience’ can be lost in translation, as each partner defines it differently. An Audience Targeting Platform provides the ability to control and standardise definitions (rather than rely on third party definitions). It brings real transparency to everyone involved and an easy way to understand which data points make-up a particular audience segment.
This ensures the same segment (and its associated definition) can be employed in the future with the user having the reassurance it will be replicated exactly. It gives publishers the confidence that an advertiser’s repeat campaign will deliver to the same audience and ensures advertisers they can replicate successful campaigns and accurately compare results.
Recognising the need for Audience Targeting Platforms.
Targeting is about clearly defining your audience and then effectively reaching them. This calls for a real understanding of their needs, based on multiple data sources, and audience targeting technology is essential to deliver this efficiently, accurately and quickly.
Audience Targeting Platforms offer something fundamentally different within the online advertising ecosystem. Still new, they tend to get shoehorned into old ‘behavioural targeting’ or ‘re-targeting’ categories which fail to recognise their ability to integrate every sort of relevant dataset into a cohesive understanding of audiences in a dynamic and flexible way. They need space to exist in their own right if marketers are to recognise the inherent commercial benefits they bring and the central role they now play.
Stuart Colman,
Managing Director UK, AudienceScience