Table of Contents
- Summary
- Campaigning: from politics to branding
- Tapping social media
- Supporting programmatic buying and selling
- Key takeaways
- About Paul Sweeting
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
What Brand Marketers Need to Target Consumer Attitudes and Lifestyles Through Digital Platforms
While social media usage generates vast quantities of data that advertisers and marketers can use for customer profiling and targeting, many brand marketers still rely on expensive and often dated survey-based market research. That’s because, in short, Facebook can tell you who and what a user likes, but it can’t tell you why.
The data on which marketers’ models rest are still largely proxies for the emotional and attitudinal roots of that behavior. Understanding those aspects of consumer behavior is still largely the province of focus groups and small-scale, in-person research studies that are often difficult to project up to a mass market, making predicting and shaping consumer behavior still more art than science.
Why Brand Marketers Need this Report:
- Most of the audience targeting and programmatic sales platforms available to advertisers today were not built with brand marketers in mind. They’re very good at identifying and targeting consumers who might be in the market for a new car or an airline ticket, based on behavioral cues, but brand marketers – unlike direct marketers – aren’t necessarily looking for that sort of immediate sales conversion.
- For brand marketers to gain maximum value from digital platforms, they will increasingly need to be able to automate the sort of qualitative audience insights on which brand campaigns are based in order to develop effective programmatic media-buying plans.
- Companies like Resonate, Choicestream, and Cubeyou offer tools that, to varying degrees, integrate traditional market research techniques with modern social media and digital tracking and profiling to enable marketers and advertisers of all types to go well beyond demographic targeting. Marketers crafting campaigns based on attitudes and lifestyles as well as demographics – especially those interested in buying digital advertising media programmatically – should evaluate these tools for adoption.
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