Targeting is the start of strategy yet many marketers are being told they no longer need to bother with it.
If you are any kind of marketer with any kind of budget you’ve recently been told not to worry about targeting. Your digital agency mate or a salesperson from one of the mega platforms explained that you don’t need to worry about all the old-fashioned target market stuff anymore. Just handover your ad, drop it down the digital mineshaft and through the power of Big Data, amazing AI and the magical healing power of algorithms your ad will find its perfect consumers while you sleep or watch 80s movies or gaze out of the window and wonder why you have a niggling feeling of despair.
The first time you heard this recommendation you probably thought to yourself, “That sounds like shitfuckery”. And there is a good reason to think this. It is shitfuckery. And of the highest possible order. And if you are well trained or simply relatively intelligent you should have become suddenly aware that the red warning lights of marketing bullshit were (once again) flashing around you.
Your cynicism should be prompted by the fact that these are the very same companies and people who – only a few years ago – extolled the exact opposite approach. Remember when it was all about personalisation? Micro-targeting? When it was super-granular? Your digital ad was not just targeted, oh no, it was ‘hyper-targeted’.
Not anymore.
The digital mob now wants you to go in exactly the opposite direction. Target everyone. The algo will take it from there. Just leave your keys with them. That should worry you because this was the exact philosophy behind programmatic and didn’t that work out just beautifully for everyone? I once described programmatic as a “big black box of turds and spiders” and was widely derided for it. But the phrase stuck. And stuck for good reason. While it’s impossible to operate without programmatic ad buying these days, it has proven to be catastrophically dodgy and wasteful.
I am startled by the number of marketers who blindly ignore the need to make targeting choices either because they don’t know they need to, or how to.
That dodgy reputation has certainly not been bolstered with the recent publication of research examining the methods used to sell digital media. Professors Michael Braun and Eric Schwartz show how the practice of A/B testing digital media is let down by divergent delivery. In theory, when platforms test ad A versus ad B, the comparison takes place across identical samples of consumers.
Except it doesn’t. Braun and Schwartz demonstrate that digital platforms simply cannot compare ads across the same market playing field. In an A/B test of two different slogans, for example, the reported superiority of A over B is not just down to slogan A but also the algorithmic selection of users for A, which was different from B and which made the outcome far more pronounced and totally bogus.
Bigger reasons…
Read The Full Article at MarketingWeek
