Multiscreen Marketing: The Seven Things You Need to Know to Reach Your Customers across TVs, Computers, Tablets, and Mobile Phones

Chapter 6Drive Efficiency by Targeting Consumer Needs, Not “Millennials and Moms”

Learn the Multi-Screen Audience Targets That Matter

The digital marketing world has a new obsession called Programmatic—the practice of triggering marketing campaigns based on a set of data-driven algorithms. This approach might include real-time bidding through ad exchanges, site retargeting, shopping cart abandonment campaigns, dynamic creative optimization, and even the sort of product recommendations on online shopping sites that are served up based on past purchases. Programmatic campaigns can be triggered by a number of different actions, from consumer demographics—age, gender, income, and often location—to online behavior.

For digital marketing, targeting is all about focusing on the audience that matters to your brand, and eliminating those audiences that don’t—ultimately making your marketing dollars more efficient. So as programmatic marketing moves to a multi-screen universe, the inevitable question arises: How do I target my audience seamlessly across screens and then measure the effects of my media? In other words, how do I know I’m getting the right audience and that my marketing is resonating with this audience on all the screens they use? We’ll tackle the measurement question in Chapter 5; here, we’re going to focus on audience targeting.

Any kind of audience targeting comes down to a fundamental question: When we buy media, what are we buying? Traditionally, we’ve bought mass ...