More light reading about behavioral targeting.

The continuing off-target discussion about behavioral targeting is a real frustration to me. 

In MediaPost’s Behavioral Insider, there’s an interview with comScore’s vice president of product management, Steve Dennen.  He’s touting a new product that purports to help advertisers better target their audiences online.

How is this done?  By segmenting groups based on how much content they consume online.  He says:

We have taken our 120+ content categories we report on — news, sports, health, finance, etc. — and segmented the audience into heavy, medium and light users.

Dennen says we should "think about it as site-level behavioral targeting."

As Charlie Brown might say . . . Ack!

Sure, I guess that’s a behavior.  But why is it worth targeting?  It’s like saying I’m a better target for a particular product if I’m a "heavy user" of Oprah reruns rather than someone who catches an episode once a month.

Back when I was a girl, heavy users meant people who bought a lot of the thing you were selling . . . pickles or brandy or sunglasses or whatever.  Not people who were addicted to the latest sports scores -- which means next to nothing in terms of what they might be likely to buy, except maybe baseball tickets.

Let me quote Dennen again: 

If you think about an electronics manufacturer or camera manufacturer, they would use the heavy and light segments differently. Let’s say they have a pretty high-end camera coming out and need to target that online. They can look at the photography category and the heavy viewers of that and base their planning decisions on using that segment. Whereas maybe they conversely are coming out with a lower end or family fun camera. That is going to be more of the casual camera audience. And in that case they would look at light photography content consumers.

I can think of all sorts of ways that example doesn’t work.  The professional photographer and the casual photographer easily could both be light users of online photography content.  The month before my husband’s birthday, I might be a heavy content viewer of photography sites looking for the right "family fun camera" for him.  The pro might know just what she wants and need only half an hour to confirm her opinions and another few minutes of price shopping.  More than the amount of time, it’s the content of the content we look at that would differentiate us.  You don’t need the heavy/medium/light distinction to figure that out.  And that’s why, online, Google is so hard to beat.

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Believing the hype about marketing ROI.

It’s not funny . . . but I had to laugh.  According to a study by Aegis Group’s Marketing Management Analytics (MMA) reported in Ad Age, nine in 10 financial executives don’t use return-on-investment metrics to set marketing budgets.  Why?  They don’t believe the numbers.

That’s not the funny or sad or even surprising part.  The shocking thing is that only 14% of marketers had confidence in their own forecasts. 

It sounds to me like both groups are pretty much in alignment.  The numbers suck and everyone knows it.

The headline in Ad Age says "Survey Finds CFOs Skeptical of Their Own Firms’ ROI Claims."  But is that the big idea?  ROI claims are rarely audited, so it’s no wonder they don’t meet CFO standards.  The news is that marketers in those companies are making ROI claims they don’t believe in or -- I’m betting -- even understand.

That discouraging piece of information isn’t the fault or responsibility of the CFO.  It’s an enormous credibility problem for the CMO.

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Is less really more in lead generation?

Over the years, I have had many discussions about quality vs. quantity in lead generation. 

Sometimes a prospect will say, "I want fewer, better leads."  Another prospective client will say, "More, more, more!  I need more leads!"

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Making your product more attractive.

The only way I know how to write compellingly about a client’s product is to fall in love with it, at least a little bit. Usually, this is easy. The old saying, "salesmen love to be sold," is true of advertising copywriters, too.

It’s a little like seeing another man enjoy the company of your wife at a cocktail party. That alone can make you appreciate her a little bit more. A prospect will often catch the excitement of the copywriter.(As long as the writing is totally credible -- which takes some balance.)

To fall in love with a product may take a little playacting. Why does the client love this product? By "the client," I mean the originator of this product. The product manager may not have a clue. Somebody had to be passionate about it -- or it never would have ended up on my desk.

And why will the buyer love this product? Some things are beyond my experience -- like the laboratory bench meters I once sold to scientists. When I figured out their capabilities, the tiny increments of difference they could measure -- and the incredible accuracy they promised -- I was completely in awe. I could talk about those fascinating objects all day.

Of course, I’ve forgotten every detail now -- including what it was those things measured. But I was definitely (though temporarily) in love at the time.

This kind of delight can’t be faked. As someone who reads creative briefs for a living, I know when the product manager is just going through the motions. I glance through the key messages and see that they’re flabby and lifeless. Bleh. They haven’t done their method acting exercises and gotten into the head of the person who will buy their product.

That’s when I get a little sad for those poor product managers. The excitement of falling in love is a big part of what makes the job of selling so enjoyable.

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The future of precision targeting.

I have hope that one day general advertisers and direct marketers will speak the same language.  That day is not yet here—but we're getting closer.  In a July 7 article in Ad Age about the changing consumer market, Peter Francese said:

In the past, target marketing focused mostly on what TV shows people in a segment watched or what radio formats they preferred or what periodicals they read.

Good to see someone in Advertising Age use the words ''target marketing'' like that. 

However, in the past, target marketing didn't really focus on TV all that much.  Advertising did.  It's great that advertisers are trying to target now.  I give them a lot of credit for that.  Francese goes on:

To some extent, that type of targeting can still work. But precision targeting in the future will rely more heavily on ethnographic research into the culture, beliefs and activities of target consumer groups, as well as their media preferences.

That makes the skeptic in me pause.  Precision targeting in the future (as now) will not be about mind-reading—so why the ethnographic research into culture and beliefs? 

I have to admit, I wasn't completely certain I knew what ethnographic research was.  So I looked it up on Wikipedia and found this amusing nugget near the end of the article:

Where focus groups fail to inform marketers about what people really do, ethnography links what people say to what they actually do—avoiding the pitfalls that come from relying only on self-reported, focus-group data.

Consumer activities (we call them behaviors) and media preferences are extremely important to know.  They're also observable and measurable.  It doesn't really matter -- to marketers -- what people say, only what they do.  Ethnography, while fascinating, can easily be left to the anthropologists.

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Consumer engagement.

So many marketers are still caught up in old school marketing, where the goal is to drive someone from unawareness to ''awareness'' and, finally, all the way to ''brand liking.''  Or something like that.  There may be an ''intent to buy'' after that.

A post on Advertising Age fine-tunes this a bit further.  Between liking and intent to purchase, there's something the author, Troy Young, calls an ''intent to engage.'' 

It makes measuring real leads and actual sales seem a little crude, doesn't it?  Being able to learn someone's intentions -- now that's refinement taken to hair-splitting, angels-dancing-on-a-pin extremes.

Direct marketers don't try to read minds the way general advertisers and other pseudo-psychics do.  I think the reason for that is that we know our own minds so well.  When I have to make a considered purchase, like a new home or a new car, I may dither right up until the last possible moment.  The length of time between intent to purchase and no intent at all and back again could move as quickly as the flutter of a butterfly's wings.

For something like an ice cream cone, I can go from unawareness to awareness to intent about as quickly as it took to me to see the Ben & Jerry's logo on the store.  Even though, up until that moment, I specifically and consciously had no intent to ever eat ice cream again as long as I lived.  And it doesn't mean I've engaged with either Ben or Jerry in the past.  It could be a local vendor in the town where I happen to be vacationing.

This is why direct marketers don't try to measure intentions.  Instead, we give the consumer plenty of reasons to purchase.  We try to connect them emotionally.  We urge them to respond sooner rather than later.  If they indicate interest, we call them a lead and nurture the budding relationship.  If they give us money, we call that transaction a sale.  We measure those.  And we respect their preference to keep any other intentions to themselves, if they wish. 

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The limits of behavioral targeting

Life is a trade-off.  My dad used to say, ''You can do anything you want.  You just can't do everything you want.''  Saying yes to one thing means saying no to many, many others.  It makes logical sense, but just about everyone still has trouble with it.

EMarketer.com came out with an article that says it all:  behavioral targeting is great, as long as you have the data.  The trade-off is a loss of reach.  Here's a quote:

Chris Kilkes, interactive media manager at Godfrey Q & Partners, said, ''The biggest problem with testing different kinds of behavioral segments is maybe we are only reaching 10,000 people on a specific site, like NYTimes.com. When you are talking about reach and trying to get frequency, that becomes pretty problematic.

''Why do I spend 10 grand on 10,000 people?'' Mr. Kilkes continued. ''Of course you would say, 'Well, that's a richer audience.' That's one of the big challenges for behavioral is you're narrowing your universe so much.''

And that's why online marketers fall back on old-school demographic targeting.  It's just plain easier.  Are you wasting money?  Almost certainly.  But at least it doesn't look like you're spending 10 grand on an audience of 10,000 people.

In my opinion, marketers are only fooling themselves with this kind of thinking.  Yes, you get more reach -- but with the wrong audience.  And when you're ''reaching'' the wrong audience, you're contributing to the clutter and irrelevance that is the enemy of marketing.  Is there a stronger word than ''enemy''?  Whatever that word is, that's what clutter and irrelevance are to your marketing campaigns.

That's why no one pays attention to your relevant advertising -- because there's so much irrelevance out there.  That's why click-through rates have dropped drastically since the beginning of banner ads.  That's why response rates to every other form of direct marketing have declined. People can't like or feel good about watching twelve irrelevant commercials for every ten minutes of television.  They hate it.  And they prove it by getting DVRs and fast-forwarding every chance they get.

Let's not try to do everything anymore.  Let's do the right thing and only market to the audience that could possibly be interested in our products or services.

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