Creeped out [INSIGHT]

By Joline McGoldrick – Research Director / Millward Brown Digital

Advertising endeavors to do many things: inspire, motivate, persuade. One thing that it almost certainly never attempts to do is “creep out” its intended audience. However, when consumers talk about targeting, one of the phrases they most frequently use is, in fact, “creeped out.”

At the same time, people construe advertising that is not personally relevant as incompetent. This paradox requires that marketers walk the fine line between providing relevant advertising, while at the same time not targeting so obtusely that audiences feel stalked or “creeped out.” Findings from Millward Brown’s most recent AdReaction study provide guidance on how marketers can walk this fine line, particularly as it relates to video advertising.

Audiences have negative opinions about the most simplistic forms of targeting: targeting based on web site visits (47 percent unfavorable), targeting based on search history (48 percent unfavorable) and targeting based on purchase history (40 percent unfavorable). Instead, audiences prefer to be targeted based on their interests (43 percent favorable) and brands that they like (38 percent favorable).

These sentiments are not mutually exclusive. Audience interest and brand preference can be derived from more explicit data points like search, purchase and website visit history. However, this paradox also requires that marketers be more sophisticated in their digital advertising targeting than just re-targeting or simplistic behavioral targeting.

Effective and audience-acceptable targeting must be aligned with how audiences make choices about the products they buy or brands in which they invest. At a minimum, this requires that targeting integrate the audience’s digital footprint, while also being screen- and audience-specific.

To be effective and well-received by audiences, targeting needs to behave more like creative and articulate the brand’s relevant use case. This means not only targeting current purchasers, but also strategically targeting non-buyers to increase upper funnel metrics.

How do marketers take this from theory to practice? It’s been a longstanding practice of marketers to pre-test their digital creative and run only those with the greatest impact in advancing brand objectives. Marketers must apply this same rigor to their media targets.

Until now, marketers have retrospectively applied limited digital touchpoints to determine whether their targeting is effective. However, as digital and mobile advertising become increasingly larger parts of the overall advertising budget, it’s also incumbent that they advance brand objectives.

This requires that marketers use more sophisticated algorithms that approximate an understanding of the viewer and her interests rather than simply telegraphing that they know where she’s been, what she’s searched and what she’s purchased. More specifically, in calibrating the weight to be allocated to these media targets, marketers must adjust these weights by how effective these targets are in advancing the advertised brand, rather than just based on intuition or limited retrospective digital touchpoints.

This discernment can be facilitated by research and analytics tools that allow marketers to test brand effectiveness, even before the media runs. It’s only by using tools and adopting more nuanced and long-term views that audience-based targeting moves from creepy and myopic to relevant and effective.