Online Audiences: Find the BEEF!
ADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — Are you mass marketing when you should be niche marketing?
In the heyday of the broadcast media era, when print and television reigned supreme, advertisers and agencies were challenged to find the one overarching campaign message that would suit their entire target market, and to serve up to mass audiences through the right print and television programming.
Great campaigns like Nike’s “Just Do It” and Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef” delivered home runs to broad audiences. In the days of television broadcast media’s greatest impact, advertisers could reach desirable audiences glued to hit shows like Dallas, which delivered 90 million American households the night they revealed “Who shot JR?”
This year, the most television popular show, American Idol, pulled in 31.7 million viewers during its season finale, according to Nielsen Media Research. The median age of an American Idol viewer, once in the mid-30s, has now aged to 42. Among women aged 18 to 34, the American Idol audience has slipped 18 percent this year. Teenage viewers 12-to-17 have dropped 12 percent. And in a recent study by Magna Global, the five broadcast television nets’ average live media (real-time television viewers) age was 50. “The median ages of the broadcast networks keep rising, as traditional television is no longer necessarily the first screen for the younger set,” says Magna’s executive vice president for audience analysis, Steve Sternberg.
For advertisers who need to reach youth audiences 13-17 and 18-34, television numbers can no longer deliver compared with online audiences. For those who want to access millions with their messaging, the apparent fragmentation of the online world tempts brands to identify the largest media outlets and dump dollars into those destinations. Portal sites such as AOL, Yahoo, MySpace and Facebook are earning huge revenues as millions of dollars shift from television.
A search of comScore’s July 2008 top 100 media properties indicates a total unique Internet audience of 189 million, with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL each reporting more than 100 million unique visitors. MySpace reports 75 million uniques, with YouTube a close second at 73 million, and Facebook trailing at 39 million. A deeper dive into these sites reveals that MySpace users skew older than Facebook users, with 35% age 45+, compared with 26%. Facebook users aged 18-24 are 23% of their uniques, where MySpace shows only 12% in that age range. For media planners and advertisers looking to target the right audiences, age-targeting users only works when members are signed in and are honest about their age, which is rare on social portal.
Are these one-size-fits-all properties really offering the best of the Web in terms of targeting and ability to deliver customized messaging? Some publishers tell a story of “conversational marketing” and claim “engagement” capabilities through targeting and tracking technologies, but the sad truth is that click-thrus from large social networking portals are abysmal, and average site usage times of twenty to forty minutes equal low clicks on banner advertisements. The larger portal sites diminish advertiser performance even further by allowing their premium ad space to be filled with visually distracting “remnant” and performance-based advertising which creates “banner blindness” among users.
The lure of interactive has always been the ability to measure campaign results and to deliver one-to-one messaging to audiences. Special interest and niche properties allow advertisers and brands to directly interact with their audiences and specifically communicate to them with a deep understanding of their interests.
The tremendous fragmentation of the online world offers an incredible opportunity for advertisers and brands to precision target their current and potential clients through effective media planning. Customizing creative for niche audiences carries little additional cost and delivers on the promise of one-to-one target marketing of the interactive world.
On the music streaming site Pandora brands can tie messaging to music themes and promote their products to more than 10 million listeners through site skins and custom playlists. The wildly popular Facebook app, Flixster, is perfect for tying your products to messaging relevant to movie lovers and entertainment buffs through a customized movie quiz, roadblock or sponsorship. DailyMotion allows advertisers to create custom film contests, run pre-roll and overlay advertising on curated film content. On the social networking site dList, brands like Armani and Scion reach the lucrative gay male audience. The massive MMO gaming network, Zam, with 20 million unique users, is an ideal place to tie your creative to gaming references and benefit from the WOW phenomenon. On the very popular iLike, advertisers can reach out to more than 10 million music influencers when they use the application on social network sites such as Facebook and Bebo; tying creative to music references can effectively capture the interest of these influencers.
These special interest audiences are predominantly the desirable influencers, who can trigger tens and even hundreds of like-minded friends and acquaintances into buying your product through viral effects and recommendation.
To improve advertiser effectiveness even more, our company has developed a “hub and spoke” model of publisher acquisition and media planning which allows us to offer advertisers customized campaigns which tap into larger audiences through sites like Last.fm and then target messaging even further though a host of niche sites such as Hype Machine, Elbo.ws, Daytrotter, GorillavsBear, MyOldKentuckyBlog, and BetterPropaganda. A campaign targeting entertainment audiences might include Flixster, MyDamnChannel, Spout, iKlipz, FilmDrunk and LatinoFilmReviews.
Click-thrus on niche sites can be as high as 3 – 5% and messaging youth audiences on multiple properties allows advertisers to capture their attention more completely. Customized media planning across these vertical hub and spoke networks allows advertisers to precision-target users in a cost-effective manner. This type of campaign planning effectively creates definable demographic and psychographic channels to perfectly identify and reach target markets. Such networks offer brands the opportunity to perform effective market research against their audiences, through user surveys and A/B testing of creative and concepts.
Advertisers and agencies should be aggressively testing new properties and leveraging the fragmentation of their online customers to their own benefit. Never before has there been a better opportunity to reach audiences with the right message, in the right location, at the right time, and to capture usable data which can be used for future marketing campaigns.
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