(Re)volution of Audience Strategy
Audiences are the driving force behind every marketing campaign. They are the focus of all strategy; they are the economic backbone of advertising. The entire marketing process begins with identifying and understanding the target market and transforming them into buyable audiences. The idea is that if you know what motivates your audience, where they consume media, how they purchase, and virtually everything you can know about someone, then you can develop more effective creative and media strategies to engage with them.
There is so much importance places in this domain that an entire cottage industry exist to service greater understanding of audiences. Research providers, segmentation specialist, customer journey builders all service a different part of audience intelligence.
If up to this point you are questioning in the importance of audience, I would encourage you to consider the massive amount of data that has been collected through our phones, computers, and televisions. All the data, every byte of it, feeds an audience machine. Gather data about the audience, sell that data to brands, brands run campaigns, gather data about audience response, sell that data to brands…and on, and on, and on.
Ok, so audiences are important. But what do I mean when I say audience? With risk of being a bit too academic, I will just say that an audience is a group of people with a shared demographic, psychographic, or behavioral trait. After reading a couple thousand client briefs and reviewing even more presentations, I have learned that there is a well-established syntax to defining and audience and it look like the:
[INSERT COMPOUND ADJECTIVE] + [INSERT DEMOGRAPHIC TRAIT] + “who/that are” + [INSERT BEHAVIORAL or PSYCHOGRAPHIC TRAIT]
Here are some examples:
- Migraine-suffering women aged 25–54, who are open to trying new things.
- Career-focus millennials who rely on new technology to get things done and are optimistic about the future.
- Cookie-purchasing households who prefer healthy snacking options.
- Image-conscious Millennial and Gen Z commuters who value form as much as function.
Even with this limited input, you can likely infer the company or vertical to which these audiences are intended to reach. You may have even begun to imagine an individual in culture or in your life that meets the criteria above. This Mad Lib-ean syntax helps to create a sort of mental short-cut to conceptualize the audience.
This syntax has become more advanced as more data has become available (or is the reason the data became available). Just imagine yourself as an early radio or television ad sales representative trying to get brands to run on your program. “Get your company’s name seen/heard by everyone in the country.” As programming became more specific you might say “Get your company’s name seen/heard by every woman in the country.” As magazines, TV, radio, and digital became more diverse and fragmented so too did the data. “Get your company’s name seen/heard by every suburban, tech-savvy, ceramicist who likes to be the first to see new vampire movies in the theater.”
While ridiculous, this example is meant to illustrate two things: (1) if you can imagine it, an audience can be created (2) the economic value of the audience to both the buyer and the seller.
It is the second point that has made audiences so important to media companies, brands, social platforms, and agencies. It is the reason that “data is the new oil”; the reason we concede privacy; the reason cookies exist, and reason provide your email at grocery store checkout. Brands and companies big and small that spend money on advertising want to ensure that they are spending their money wisely. They want reassurance that they are reaching the right people and they want the technology to allow them to do so.
So, if audiences are so embedded and so important to the marketing process, how will this process evolve? What revolution is taking place to completely redefine how audiences are created and what ads are delivered?
The answer is already here — it is an advertising engagement model that operates like TikTok. Unlike other platforms, TikTok does not place value on their user’s traditional identity markers like age, gender, and income, but rather it values what draws attention and engagement. The trick here is that TikTok cares more about the content than the consumer. Just look at a very simplified new user on-boarding. The audience for a TikTok video is define by their interaction vs. a set of personal attributes.
They information that is captured on the user is almost irrelevant. The power of the app is in its ability to deliver onboarding content that rapidly trains an algorithm. The volume and variety of videos are simply stimulus-response experiment. Some videos are random, but quickly tune the user’s instance of the app across topics, interest, trends, and viral moments. Through a microscope each video is a topic, but in totality the app is being trained to understand “aesthetics.” The complete encapsulation of images, characters, sounds, copy, hashtags, topics, etc. that are likely to capture attention.
The platform’s ability to capture attention has nothing to do with who the user is, but what aesthetics they value. When advertising adopts this model, there is massive potential to shift the advertising workflow from one that starts with audience, to one where groups of people are grouped based on their desired aesthetics — the sights, sounds and motions that drive engagement and outcomes. That means that the advertising workflow must start with content/stimulus to define an audience.
Simply put, when building an audience, would you rather know they age and gender, or would you rather know that they like inspirational advertising. Would you rather know that they are frequent purchasers of toothpaste, or that they respond well to product demonstrations.
The ability to develop audiences based on aesthetics and not demographics has the potential to:
- Enhance advertising performance.
- Provide audiences with content that is meaningful to them.
- Deduce costs associated with audience tools.
- Decrease dependency on audience buying platforms.
- Increase the value of marketing data.
This model is highly dependent on the efficient creation of content (i.e., ads). While we are a long way from high-quality video and digital assets, generative tools are closing the gap between imagination and execution. While I recognize that new methods of creation require reworking legal approvals and compliance with brand guidelines, it is less difficult to imagine this barrier becoming a small speed bump in the coming years.
Share your thoughts on this potential revolution in the chat!