Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Targeting Is Now A Necessity For Most Marketers
byYou don’t buy the whole produce department to get the fruit you really want. You don’t buy every novel at Barnes & Noble to make sure you’ll find something you enjoy reading. Why? It’s expensive, wasteful, impractical, and it just doesn’t make sense. The same holds true for mass marketing in an era where targeting has become a science and a necessity for most marketers. Apparently, the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) and eMarketer agree on that conclusion. In a recent December 2005 AAAA survey, less than 3 out of 10 people who are currently in the marketing or advertising business felt untargeted, mass media could be very effective in the future.
Instead many advertisers are turning to online marketing tools to find ways to more precisely target and measure marketing activities such as advertising, PR, and sales promotion. Another American Advertising Federation poll shows American advertising professionals felt the biggest benefits to online advertising included 1) its ability precisely target to audiences (84 percent), 2) online advertising’s capacity to measure ROI (75 percent), and 3) the strength of new online ad methods to break through the clutter that is now problematic in mass media advertising (62 percent).
The effects of this shift to more precise targeting can already be seen. Advertising Age magazine reported Monday that the fall television advertising buy could be down as much as $600 million. And where is that $600 million going instead? According to Advertising Age, many are looking at the wealth of digital options.
