Audience discovery - Targeting Passions

I read an interview of Bill Gossman, CEO Revenue Science on Media Post’s Behavioral Insider. Bill talked about the concept of “audience discovery” to find the right audience for an advertiser.

Here is what Bill Said “In terms of working with an advertiser or agency, the method is to start with their conception of what an ideal consumer for their product or brand would be, and then to locate the audience whose patterns of behavior and passions (as identified by their patterns of engagement) most clearly connect to that model. We call it ‘audience discovery.’”

I agree with Bill, the better you understand the consumers behavior (now called passion) the better targets you will you. That’s the whole premise of Behavioral Targeting to begin with. You start with a very basic set of behavior e.g. somebody who visits a “Auto Section” on a site or an “Auto Site” in the network. The refine your segment by adding other criteria such as a user who then visits say “baby cloths” site, now this user might be somebody who is probably expecting a kid etc. So could be a better target for a minivan. The more behavioral criteria you add the better targets you get.

However the more granular you get with your segments the reach becomes a problem. Yes there will be quality but reach might not be enough to justify the cost and efforts of reaching these targets. For publishers this also causes inventory management issues. This is the reasons why BT providers created predefined segments.

Read my previous posts on Behavioral Targeting