Recovered Post: Behavioral Marketing and the Gazelle Demographic

 Recovered Posts: So I switched blogging software and haven’t managed to get the old posts back. While I may have the time to figure it out one day, I figured I would take the opportunity to reprint some of my favorite old posts. I apologize for those who have been around since the beginning. Ignore if you like.

Today, eMarketer predicted a huge growth in the area of behavioral advertising, and I figured it might be a good time to find out exactly what that is. So, I researched. I read. I asked, and I will relate my findings. In an effort to retain some originality as I rehash a definition many of you might be familiar with, I will discuss this in an unnecessarily elaborate metaphor.

Imagine you are an advertising agency contracted to advertise a variety of savanna related products and services. These are products and services useful to denizens of the grassy plains of sub-Saharan Africa. One of these products is an anti-lion spray, favored particularly by zebras and gazelles, called Not-Prey. One small spritz of the Not-Prey spray and lions will turn up their noses at even the youngest and sickest potential provender.

Your agency, realizing the importance of targeting, has decided against the more high visibility but haphazard options in savanna advertising such as bull elephant billboards or choreographed buzzard skywriting. The expense of these options (not to mention the hazards involved in painting the side of an irritable elephant) have encouraged more “targeted” techniques. While a breathtaking vulture presentation in the air above your potential customers has the possibility of reaching a very large number of viewers, it also is seen by everyone else in the area, and you’re paying for that exposure.

Instead, your agency decides to target an area frequented by your demographic. Prey, with all the running they are forced to do, are often tired and thirsty.  They require a significant amount of water to stay fast and agile, and thus, they have an extraordinarily high rate of watering hole visits. The target audience for Not-Prey are some of the most regular users of the watering hole and, therefore, that location is a great place in which to reach them. So, you hire a few local amphibians to pop up with a carefully crafted advertising message (something about not being eaten) as watering hole users bends to take a drink.

This is a pretty standard style of targeted advertising that locates its customers through the content they are consuming, in this case, water. However, the problem is that a fairly wide range of individuals might consume similar content, in this case, virtually everybody. So, even though you are getting a high number of views, a considerable number of which are from your targeted demographic, there a still quite a few irrelevant ad messages being delivered. For instance, lions, who also use the watering hole, have no use for Not-Prey and, in fact, might be irritated by the ads. It is not wise to irritate a lion.

So, your agency decides to pursue a behavioral advertising campaign. You hire some smarter amphibians who, by observing the behavior of the creature bending down to drink, can deliver a relevant message on a relevant product or service. For instance, if the drinker has a tendency to be chased, pulled to the ground and eaten, the amphibian will deliver an ad for Not-Prey, whereas should the fearsomely clawed and sharped-toothed water-slurper be more likely to be the chaser than the chasee, the amphibian might deliver ad for a more relevant product like Hyena Heckler, the predator’s answer to nature’s jerk.

Behavioral ads are not attached specifically to the content being consumed. Instead they are based on past “behaviors” or actions. In web terms this can mean search terms or sites visited (on the savanna it can mean previous responses to the smell of weakness). The technology to present these types of ads, tailored to the users history of interest is growing more and more sophisticated. This, according to eMarketer, leads to significant growth as companies see the conversion rate benefits of behaviorally targeted ads.

Help a Neophyte:
As a consumer, how would you feel about being targeted according to prior activity? Is this a privacy concern, or would the relevancy of the ads to your interests actually reduce irritation at advertisements? If, as advertisers, we make use of behavioral advertising, do we risk offending customers by appearing to “spy” on them?