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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If you found this helpful, please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at the top right of the page. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFP is always free.

A Business beyond Marketing and Advertising

Fun Is Imminent

Over the July 4 weekend, I took my kids to a place they have been to at least a dozen times. I spent hundreds of dollars, drove about seven hours round trip, and did loads of stuff we have done, well, many times. I am likely to do it again in a few months, if not sooner. When we do this again, the kids will call their friends to see who can go with us, and try to find someone that has not been with us on this trip yet, because they love to tell new people about it as much as I do.

What I am talking about is Knoebels, a family-run and operated amusement park that is in its 89^th year of operation in central Pennsylvania. It is the largest amusement park of its kind in America, in that admission is – get this – free. So is parking. Admission to rides are by tickets or armbands, with rides ranging, on the most part, from $1 to $3.

What are the rides like? Start with world-class wooden roller coasters. The Phoenix gets raves for “air time”, which is when you float along with the coaster, rather than stay in the seat. I’m also a fan of the hardcore workout and force of the Twister, the park’s highest and fastest ride. There is also a new retro-cool Flying Kites ride that runs without a track.

Going beyond coasters, I’m a big fan of the old-school bumper cars with true punch. Some prefer the well-done dark haunted house, or appreciate the huge section with smaller-scale rides for little kids. There is also a great big pool and waterslide area, an ancient carousel where you grab brass rings for a prize, a Ferris Wheel, old-time trains and cars, and more, more, more.

Every year brings new rides, because the management is constantly on the lookout to add ride assets from the open market. (This year, it is a metal looping roller coaster. I am not a fan of upside down, so you will have to ask someone else how good it is.)

Knoebels has a social media feed, though it almost seems sacrilege. They have also done some local spot TV advertising, and I am sure there is some channel and affiliate marketing done. But all of that seems besides the point, because to my eyes, Knoebels is a business that is done so well, it doesn’t need marketing or advertising.

What it needs is word of mouth, which is good, because it is plainly phenomenal at generating it.

There is, honestly, nothing that I want to change about this place. You can bring your own food, and even your own dog, if you like. If you buy food, it is great quality and fairly priced. You can actually win prizes in the arcades without unnatural skill or costly persistence. The mix of food for sale is downright amazing, with everything from the usual carnival fare (meat on a stick, ice cream, cotton candy, etc.) to an impressive array of healthier options.

Wait times for rides rarely get long enough to negatively impact your day, and even if they do, you aren’t as stressed as you are in big admission parks, because you aren’t trying to make sure you are getting your fair ration of fun per dollar. That also means that everyone in the park is in a better mood, and there is no horrible class system of fast pass privilege to help generate meltdowns.  It is as safe as houses, to the point where you find yourself giving your kids the green light to go off and have their own adventures. Try this place once, and you may never get your kids to go to the big name places again.

Even on my toughest day at this park – a day where multiple children brought flu with them that then got worst at the park, which meant I had to cut the visit short and drive them home with a car filled with nausea – everyone involved has thanked me, profusely, for taking them, and wanted to come back soon. That is because Knoebels runs their business to encourage true evangelism from their guests, and long-term, repeat business. That is why they are free to enter, free to park, and free to enjoy, at any activity level. They want to be the amusement park that you call home.

At this point, you might be wondering where the catch is, or if Knoebels is one of my agency’s clients. There are no catches, and my only interest in Knoebels is as a fan, and as someone who wants to make sure the place is around for future generations.

They do not need my agency’s services, because their product sells itself. It also markets itself, too. Such is the power of transcendent customer service.

May it always be so!

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Speaking of making customers happy, I would like to ask you to like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP box at the top right of this page.  We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.

Confessions of a Smartphone Hater

Filled arms, empty minds

Today, I gave up the ghost of my badly aging smartphone and upgraded. I was well past my contract past due date, the device was losing integrity on battery life and performance, and my work requires an effective mobile device. 

Joining me in the exercise was the CTO of my small business, AKA my wife, a gadget enthusiast who knows tons more about these things than I do. The agency’s shareholders (AKA my kids) were also very happy about the purchase. To be fair, they have put up with my growing frustration over the old device’s performance, particularly while using the mapping feature in my cab duties for their social lives.

As for me? I had so little enthusiasm for the transaction that the clerk at my local phone store felt moved to beg for a good survey result. She may have also given me more than expected on the trade-in value just because I seemed so nonplussed by the experience.

I am old enough to (a) remember when this tech was beyond the dreams of James Bond directors, and (b) really, truly enjoy the limited amount of time when I do not have the device on me. (Mostly during workouts and yard work. But I digress.)

It seems incredibly ungrateful to complain about the failures of any smartphone. Even on its worst day, the phone that I gave up today was a marvel of technology, received information from space, and made me more productive. If it only had continued to work as well as the day when I got it, I would still be using it.

I’m also enough of an environmentalist and fair trade capitalist to consider the incredibly short lifespan of these devices to be a true scandal, and feel complicit in multiple crimes by making a purchase, let alone being a customer.

The ambivalence goes deeper still. This is my fourth smartphone in the past 15 years, and it is the first with a virtual keyboard, rather than a real key QWERTY machine. Sure, I could have stuck to my guns and kept the feature, and the amount of typos and auto-correct fails might drive me to distraction, but you have to make too many other compromises to justify it. As a marketer, I need to be in the mainstream.

My first smartphone was a Blackberry in a holster, with quick-draw email speed and the expectation that the device was for work first, with all that implies in terms of time off meaning time away. The fact that these are now so ubiquitous, with the majority of Web traffic coming on the platform (admit it, you are reading this on one, aren’t you?) Does not fill me with joy.

But when I dig down deep enough, what’s the real objection?

It is one thing to know, intellectually, that the world is moving away from text to images. That ship sailed in the monochrome monitor age.

It is quite another point to get a reminder of that, emotionally, every time I look at the screen. A screen that I will look at more than any other, over the lifespan of the device.

And finally, something else entirely to know that as an advertising and marketing pro, I can either learn to love this screen, or fail to keep pace with the prime demographic that most of my clients want to reach.

No one ever said progress was easy, right?  

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Speaking of reaching a moving target, I would like to ask you to like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or visit my agency’s site. We offer copywriting, direction and strategy, along with design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. The RFPs are always free. Hope to hear from you soon.