Using Demographics In A Programmatic Age

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By way of introduction, this was inspired by recent pieces that talked about how demographics are dead (Dead! Dead I tell you!) in regards to marketing and advertising plays now. Dead being, as far as I can tell, clickbait for creatives. Anyway, let’s step back from the ever-present device and discuss how your traditional training and thought process still has value, even in a data-driven age.

If you are a marketing and advertising pro with any shrewdness or time to spend on the task, you monitor what your competitors are doing. It is simple enough to do with subscribing to email newsletters, and if you really want to go above and beyond the ability of most, you also know about Moat, a graphic search engine for display ads. However, there’s a simple enough tactic that can go one step further for you.

Demographics get a bad rap these days in terms of campaign targeting, and that’s justified, for the plain and simple reason that you can do better with programmatic and remarketing plays. Reaching the right consumer is more important and efficient than reaching the right type of consumer, because the data just shows a win for the former, and even the slummiest of content sites is patronized by a handful of optimal prospects. Buy the prospect, not the site, assuming that viewability isn’t broken. (It is, but that’s a problem for another day.)

The key takeaway? Just because demographics are no longer the best or only way to find prospects, doesn’t mean that they are no longer important to marketing and advertising pros. It just means that they are not as important in terms of the mechanics of reach in lead generation.

Where the demo still matters is in creative, in establishing and protecting the brand. Brand marketing also tends to get short shrift in data-driven and direct mediums. The argument is that you have already established brand value, especially in remarketing plays, and you are better off using optimal practices, including but not limited to aggressive pricing, functionality and dynamic elements.

The problem with this approach is that it treats your prospect as an entirely logical individual with his or her thought process, as if everyone in the prospect pool was engaged in a bot-level buying decision. Which means that your margins are in for a bad time, and so is your lifetime value.

Happily for vendors, there are better ways to run a campaign.

The first is to know your consumer category, and to take into consideration your brand value. For e-commerce plays like apparel, shoes and niche plays with high tactile impact, the brand and individual SKUs matter much more. You are not buying a dress because you have seen the exact same piece at five different stores; you buy the dress because it matches your style, and you trust the brand to make pieces that make you feel good when you put them on. That is a fundamentally better place to be from a margin standpoint.

The second approach is to look outside of your consumer category for inspiration and optimal practices. For our apparel play, check out how non-competing providers handle their work in, say, beauty or accessories. For upscale travel, consider financial services, premium personals or high-end consumer electronics. You can often find inspiration and great testing points that will take you beyond an execution-only optimization moment, and into something that is far more actionable for future iterations.

Finally, there is the possibility of co-promotional marketing opportunities and swaps from his kind of research, especially in niche plays. If you can reach a similar prospect list without going into the heavy lifting of finding and building said list? That’s where dramatic and powerful growth can happen, on an affiliate-style level.

It’s a swing for the fences technique, to be sure, but doesn’t it sound a lot more promising than just trying to beat your control? Or tossing everything you know about your buyer demos in the dustbin of history?

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