As more and more marketers and agencies look to buy audiences on the Internet, or more specifically audience data segments, most are buying on age and gender. Buying media space or time based on a primary audience target, such as Men 18-34 or Women 25-54, is the most traditional and popular form of media targeting.
However, as the larger media providers grow, the composition of their users gradually shifts from high concentration, specific audience segments to a more general audience that mirrors the population of the Internet as a whole. What was once a niche website at the onset grows to a mass consumption medium and loses its specific audience composition in favor of a larger, broader set of users or customers. As a result, those larger publishers are now having a harder time delivering efficient reach among any specified target.
Media planners and buyers who purchase television time have been buying spots from television networks targeting those specific shows that have the highest reach and compositions of their desired target audience. Contextual relevance was nearly impossible to target until the cable networks began broadcasting in the 1980′s and provided specialized programming on lifestyle interests such as sports, food and travel. Competition among the television networks heated up, and agencies began to demand guarantees against specific audience segments. If enough reach wasn’t delivered against the specified target, make-goods were demanded until the guarantee was delivered. This is still common practice for TV buyers today, in both the Upfront and scatter marketplaces.
Today, as the larger lifestyle-focused publishers continue to fight for their share of marketing budgets, they’re getting squeezed by search, social media, web portals, Internet service providers and ad networks. Each of these new competitors has a tremendous advantage over a site with 20 million or fewer unique visitors, as they can deliver enormous reach against any audience type, often with contextually relevant content, and at an extremely efficient rate. So how can a large publisher continue to compete effectively and continue to grow their revenue 30 to 50 percent annually, as only the best publishers and ad sales teams have been able to do over the past 10 years? This level of growth is quickly coming to an end, and only the sites that evolve with the marketplace will be able to keep up.
Gathering insights about your site’s users can be done in a number of ways. The most common practice is to use 3rd party panel research such as ComScore or Nielsen, which compare a publisher’s site to the overall web population or to other specific sites. But these services often fall short of providing more complex functionality like providing demographics by section of a site. Another common practice is to provide an audience description based on registration or membership information. This is often more reliable, as it utilizes actual information provided directly by the person rather than extrapolated panel data. Today, there are technologies available to publishers, such as Crowd Control from Lotame, that provide more detailed and accurate information about their audiences beyond demographics, such as individual interests and behaviors as indicated by actual site navigation.
Gaining such insights will enable publishers to target marketers’ messages more effectively, sell custom audience segments, buy additional audience segments and/or create more content to meet the needs and demands of their audiences. The more a publisher learns about their audience, the more valuable, useful and actionable the information becomes. It can take months to learn how to maximize the value of an audience, but until a publisher gets started collecting and organizing such data, they’ll always be months away from regaining the revenue growth pace that they’re expected to continue to maintain…at least for 2011.
Bruce Budkofsky, Vice President of Platform Sales & Services, Lotame
