The Rise of the Platform Marketer: Performance Marketing with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, Plus the Latest High-Growth Digital Advertising Platforms

Chapter 5Audience Management

Special Contributor: Peter Vandre

Audience management is the discipline of identifying audiences and managing the contact strategy and corresponding conversation flow with these consumers. When done well, audience management maximizes customer value across interactive and offline touchpoints. Effective audience management is the next layer on top of a foundation of identity management. It is the role of identity management to stitch together the various unique identifiers (cookie ID, device IDs, social handles, email, address, etc.) into an identity map enabling the persistent tracking of that consumer and their actions over time. Analytics are applied to these identities to transform identities into segments that can be used to reach valuable audiences.

Why Audience Management is Important

Publishers must manage audiences carefully to cultivate their value. Value can come in many forms, including advertiser revenue, data sales, subscription services, or product sales. If publishers maximize only the short-term value of an audience, it is often at the expense of long-term value. In the short history of the Internet, there are many instances where consumers abandoned publishers because the consumer experience was destroyed in the process of trying to monetize those audiences. Consumers have many choices, and news travels fast in cyberspace, so when they start to leave a brand, it can lead to the rapid destruction of the brand. A perfect example of ...