Unintended consequence of understanding audiences
A central focus of marketing strategy is to know your audience. There is no shortage of frameworks, approaches, research, and methods to understand your audience. We seek answers to know who buys and how they use the product or services, we want to know doesn’t buy and why. We try to learn where they shop, what their hobbies are, what they browse, and the shows they watch. We look at demographics, psychographics, geography, and attitudes in an effort to uncover what make our audiences unique. If we are able to learn something new and novel about our audience, it can be leveraged to make great creative, build a media plan, and generate positive business outcomes.
This exercise is core to effective marketing and advertising strategy. It is an exercise that is performed over-and-over across media and strategy departments on behalf of clients big and small. Hidden within this effort is a definitional divide that ha inhibited the best brands from reaching their full potential. Having spent seven years in media strategy and buying understanding media consumption habits, five years buildling a saas-based consumer research platform, and another five deep in the walls of creative agencies, I have come to learn that “audience” takes on very different meanings depending on the room you are in.
For a media strategist, an audience is a group of people to be targeted. The job it to understand where they are, how we can reach them, and find new context and experiences for them to engage. For a media buyer, an audience is often a group of people to be targeted. They translate audiences into boolean logic so that ads can be effectively and efficiently delivered to the transparent screens in front of them. For a creative, an audience is an conceptual imagining of an group.
I recognize this generalization, but I have seen this play out thousands of times. And for the most part, I believe every discipline is focused on the correct outcome. But there there is an unintended consequence of this fragmented definition of “audience” — Interpretations become too literal.
Let’s pretend that our audience is a woman 25–54 that enjoys spending time outdoors. Armed with this thin level of information, literal interpretation can lead to reductive planning and poor execution.
Media strategist: Develops a contextual targeting plan to be in content related to outdoor activity and a activation partnership with REI.
Media buyer: Builds audience of W25–54, hobbies = outdoor activity
Creative strategy: Creates a does research and builds persona to better understand what motivates outdoor enthusiast and what the experience provides them
Creative team: Decides to include outdoor lifestyle imagery into the creative work.
The problem with literal interpretation is a in going false assumption. That assumption is that if someone enjoys the outdoors, then they are more likely to engage or appreciate when outdoor-related content is in their advertising.
In this example, every department is operating with complete rationality. Given the input, they produce an appropriate output. When viewed collectively, it is clear that the best outcome was not reached. This is a perfect example of the Paradox of Rationality — those making the rational choices predicted by backward induction often receive worse outcomes.
Bridging this audience divide is not solved by creating a unified definition of what an audience is, but rather an understanding that the word has a different meaning depending on the context and will generate vastly different outcomes.
The good news is that there is another side to the Reationality Paradox — to make irrational or naïve choices often yeild better payoffs. I would argue that the best work coming from both creative and media strategy departments — ones that demonstrate wild creativity come as a result of thinking irrationally.
To overcome the audience chasm we need to bridge the understanding of eeach departments work. But rather than build a bridge, or maybe we fill the entire chasm with a giant inflatable bouce house and hop across.