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Sarah Welch is COO and co-founder of Mindset Media, an Internet ad network for brands.

Using its proprietary psychographic standard, Mindset Media lets brand advertisers target millions of people with the personality traits that fit their brands in simple online media buys.

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The Shortest Path Through the Long Tail

Written on
May 21st 2008
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by Sarah Welch  |
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donottrack_medium.jpgADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — Unlike traditional media, anyone can quickly and easily create content on the Internet. One side effect is that the Internet expands at a rate unlike any medium before it. But its vast and rapidly expanding “Long Tail” makes the challenge of buying online media extremely difficult, particularly for brand marketers in need of sufficient audience scale.

Assuming marketers are able to navigate around questionable content, they must cobble together hundreds, if not thousands, of niche sites to deliver their message to enough people to impact their business. It’s no wonder that big brands find it difficult to expand their presence online beyond the major portals.

One way around this shortcoming is via audience-based targeting. Simply stated, audience-based targeting delivers ads to the “right” Internet users at the “right” time based on their past Web behavior, wherever they are online. This approach requires a shift in thinking for many marketers; it’s about buying relevant audiences, not relevant content. It’s a powerful capability that, in effect, acts like an electromagnetic wand for marketers to pass over the Internet (and the Long Tail in particular) and extract the audiences of greatest interest.

The current generation of audience-based targeting picks off individuals who have “tripped a trigger” indicating they are in the market for something, which is perfect for delivering messages that attempt to influence a consumer’s decision at or close to the point of purchase. But the next generation of targeting will focus on helping brand marketers “fill the funnel” with more of the right people before they register interest. One such approach is psychographic targeting.

Marketers have long known that personality traits correlate strongly with buyer behavior and brand affinity, but until recently have had no way of targeting psychographics in media. Psychographic targeting would enable marketers in highly competitive categories, where psychographic traits such as spontaneity, pragmatism and assertiveness spell the difference between brand zealots and the indifferent — to effectively “turn up the volume” against their most important consumers.

As the Internet continues to expand and unfold, marketers and their agencies must look to capabilities like audience-based targeting to extend their presence online beyond the portals and into the Long Tail. The good news for marketers is that new advances in targeting technology, such as psychographic targeting, are making it ever easier to reach highly desirable audiences wherever they happen to be online.

Take a peak into personality:

From what a person eats, to what kind of car he or she drives, even how a person interacts with other media, research has shown that mindsets matter. Here is a look inside the buying behavior of people who are highly open, also known as “Openness 5’s”:

Highly open people seek rich, varied and novel experiences, believing that imagination and intellectual curiosity contribute to a life well-lived. They are receptive to their own inner feelings and may feel both happiness and unhappiness more intensely than others. Openness 5’s are:

  • 153% more likely to always purchase organic products
  • 104% more likely to drive a hybrid car
  • 61% more likely to own a Mac
  • 46% more likely to purchase three or more pairs of sneakers per year.


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