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Sarah Novotny is the Sr. Editor in Charge of Adotas. Sarah grew up in San Jose, California. Her educational and professional career have taken her to both Los Angeles and New York City where she received a B.F.A. from NYU. As a writer, Sarah has free-lanced for various publications focusing primarily on traditional advertising and media reviews. When not writing and editing for Adotas, Sarah is continuing her acting career in various theatrical and film/television productions.

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Boys will be Boys Online: ADOTAS Surveys the Wanderlust and Whims of the 18-34 Male Web Audience

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October 18th 2006
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As part of our ongoing efforts to gauge the current online behavior of the 18-34 male demographic, ADOTAS recently conducted a survey run across four networks, inquiring about initial Internet intent, purchasing habits, multitasking patterns and preferred verticals.

Our first step was to get outside perspective from an authoritative source on this demo, Todd Anderman, President of Dennis Digital—home of Maxim.com and Blender.com among other properties. With Anderman providing plenty of insight from Dennis’ birds-eye view, ADOTAS is now turning its focus inward and gaining exclusive survey analysis from the agency side—and one of the largest at that.

ADOTAS had the fortune of getting in-depth analysis and frank observations from Matt Wood, manager of media development at Avenue A | Razorfish. While Wood shares many of the same reactions when it came to the results, which are displayed after the jump, he insists—to Razorfish, at least—that demographics aren’t as influential of an advertising criterion as they once were, and that more niche behaviors comprise marketing efforts.

What are your initial thoughts on this survey?

From the agency point of view, at first pass, it doesn’t impact what we do. We have such a diversified pool of advertisers, and those advertisers—the sophisticated ones—aren’t using demographics as a select for marketing. They’re using actions and cookies as the tool to identify and speak to users. Whether they’re 18 or 58, it doesn’t matter, as long as they’re exemplifying the actions that our advertisers are looking to [capitalize on]. I think there’s a lot of energy spent talking on demographics, when behaviors are a lot more relevant and actionable in most instances.

As far as what we’re seeing, we have a pool of advertisers, from Nike, Apple and Best Buy, to female brands like Victoria’s Secret and Ann Taylor, as well as brands that span all ages, Astrazeneca, CapitalOne, and Chase. As an agency, we don’t have a small pool of clients and focus in one area. We’re diversified enough, and if we’re going use demographics as a tool, that [18-34] demographic is only one small part of the suite of people we’re trying to speak to at any given time.

But demographics still play a big role for some.

For some marketers, it is. A lot of marketers still use demographics as their first line of selection for where they’re placing media. But once you get over that, and you start looking at behaviors, cookies, repeat shoppers or one-time visitors, then I think it’s something that marketers have to pay attention to and should be utilizing. But not all marketers want to or can or choose to. I would say that agencies that properly utilize third-party ad serving, from both an ad serving point-of-view and conversion point-of-view from data collection on a client’s site, and then mapping that information back against their ongoing media efforts through marketing, those are the people that start not using old metrics and using new metrics—cookie-level data, extremely actionable, granular data collection that you can then do something about. The whole principle here is that collecting information in and of itself, if you can’t do anything with it, it’s pointless. But not every agency or advertiser has the desire, capabilities or resources to do that.

It is a select, but it is just not the primary select for smart marketers. Looking at the results, what most marketers are looking for is trending. It would be interesting to do this exercise again a year from now, and hopefully you can reach the same core of people, if not the same individuals. I would ask the same questions and look at trending. It’s just a slice of time. But on the other hand, if you ask the same pool of people later on, you might find that there is a change. That’s the kind of thing that marketers find really compelling, that kind of trending.

What specific questions stood out to you?

There were a lot of questions around purchasing things, and I’d say that there were a lot of ‘no’s’ to online purchasing, [which means] online retailing is still in its teenage years. The question around multitasking while at home, “do you watch television when you’re on the Internet”, and the majority of people don’t. The majority of people aren’t multi-screeners, and that runs in contrast to what popular thinking is. Also, the footprint of word-of-mouth and the relative lack of the penetration of radio and print media in this age group is reinforced. It’s not surprising, but it continues to put a pretty bright spotlight on how important word-of-mouth is, and relatively speaking, how much more traditional media is losing relevance to the segment.

I guess like any survey, it only speaks for segments versus the whole.

We view these kinds of responses through the filter of our own experience. You might be a music downloader, or you might be an online shopper, or you might be a consumer of online information—that might be your habits and your preferences. But it certainly isn’t the necessarily the habits of everyone. What we’re learning here is the vast majority of online users are still not doing the actions we want them to be doing, and that’s likely not going to change anytime soon. I don’t think there any big watersheds or disrupters here that are going to come down the water pipe and change how consumers are going to behave.

But demographics still play a big role for some.

For some marketers, it is. A lot of marketers still use demographics as their first line of selection for where they’re placing media. But once you get over that, and you start looking at behaviors, cookies, repeat shoppers or one-time visitors, then I think it’s something that marketers have to pay attention to and should be utilizing. But not all marketers want to or can or choose to. I would say that agencies that properly utilize third-party ad serving, from both an ad serving point-of-view and conversion point-of-view from data collection on a client’s site, and then mapping that information back against their ongoing media efforts through marketing, those are the people that start not using old metrics and using new metrics—cookie-level data, extremely actionable, granular data collection that you can then do something about. The whole principle here is that collecting information in and of itself, if you can’t do anything with it, it’s pointless. But not every agency or advertiser has the desire, capabilities or resources to do that.

What would you like to see moving forward with this type of survey?

[Demographics] is a select, but it is just not the primary select for smart marketers. Looking at the results, what most marketers are looking for is trending. It would be interesting to do this exercise again a year from now, and hopefully you can reach the same core of people, if not the same individuals. I would ask the same questions and look at trending. It’s just a slice of time. But on the other hand, if you ask the same pool of people later on, you might find that there is a change. That’s the kind of thing that marketers find really compelling, that kind of trending.



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