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
But there are bigger reasons than algorithmic hanky-panky to not give up on targeting. Most revolve around the fact that marketing is, and I seem to write this on a weekly basis, a lot more than just advertising. It’s 92% not advertising if you follow my logic. And that big beefy proportion needs targeting to set it on the right course, irrespective of how your advertising will later operate.
Long before you think about communications, you should be working on strategy. Focusing on the targets that are underserved in the market. Those that deliver better outcomes than others. And that like your product. On targets that will influence others down the track to buy. That’s a bigger strategic question than the tactical issue of who to show my ad to.
Obviously, ad targets are predicated on broader targeting decisions. But the strategic horse in this case must come before the tactical carriage. Partly because it needs to do the pulling but also because there are lots of carriages, not just the shiny silver advertising one at the back, to pull.
Targeting is the start of strategy. Without it, you cannot get a good product/market fit.
I will give you a good example of how this plays out. If we just let our Mini MBA ads run based on open rates, our best results would come from so-called growth marketers who work in so-called performance marketing in hotbeds of performance marketing like India and the UAE. But I know these delightful young people don’t have the money for the course. Or the patience to do three hours of consistent study a week. Most have zero chance of becoming a CMO and sending their whole team on the course that got them the big job in the first place.
So, we don’t target growth marketers. Not because they are not lovely people. And not to the degree that we would turn any of them down if they did want to study (in April, filling fast). But we have made a choice. A strategic choice. A selfish strategic choice. A selfish strategic choice about who we do not want to spend money on. Because we do not have infinite resources. And we must focus on where it will perform best. Not in ad open rates. But long-term business prosperity.
Take a step back
Proper marketers start with a target consumer. We do that because we have to build a product, not just an ad, around them. We also have to price it right. Long before we think about media we are testing the nascent product’s potential price against who we think we want to target. And there is also the thorny issue of physical availability and using targeting decisions to make sure we are available before our comms hit the spot.
Don’t get me wrong, a little optimisation is a great thing. I like the idea that AI can now look across my strategic target market and identify others who are likely to behave in a similar fashion. That makes sense to me. So does working out which ads seem to be working better than others and prioritising these winners.
But 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. Or because they’ve been told that ‘modern’ marketers don’t do that stuff anymore. A 2022 survey of big brand marketers by Better Briefs found a third of the sample of clients didn’t articulate a target consumer in their brief to the agency. I’d fire that group. Because when the targeting domino does not fall you can make a coherent argument that everything else after it from product to budget to position is probably not going to fall either.
Worryingly even among the two-thirds of marketers who told Better Briefs they were clear on targeting when they briefed their agency, many were also mistaken. Only a third of agencies come away from the initial brief with a client clear on who they want to target. A third. Holy cow.
Put that partly down to bad briefing. Down to the complexities of modern targeting where you can make a case from everything from personalisation to mass-marketing to two-speed approaches in the middle. It’s never been harder to make a targeting choice.
But also put it down to the giant digital platforms, their enormous influence and giant armies of salespeople who are now telling marketers not to worry about targeting. AI will take it from here.
Targeting is the start of strategy. Without it, you cannot get a good product/market fit. Or position. Or work out competitors. Or price properly. Or recruit a representative sample. Or do any of the subsequent tactical shit that follows. Don’t be part of the bozo army that makes up two-thirds of our embarrassingly unable discipline and who approach an agency without being clear on targeting. Who are you going after? And who are you not? Simple questions. Hard to answer. But essential nonetheless.
Mark Ritson teaches targeting along with all kinds of other fundamental, advanced stuff on his acclaimed Mini MBA courses.
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