TARGUSinfo Interactive Insights

You don’t need me or any other marketer to tell you that the Hispanic population growth is real. 

Kelly McDonald, the guest keynote at today’s Professional Marketing Association (PIMA) Midyear Meeting in Leesburg, VA, made it clear that marketers need to start thinking about it RIGHT NOW.

Why now?  According to McDonald, the upcoming US Census will unveil that there are 50 million Hispanics living in America.  That number is particularly impressive when she detailed that 50 million means:

1) US Latino population would be the third largest Hispanic country in the world

2) US Latino population is larger than the entire country of Canada

Has your organization felt this wave of opportunity or panic (depending on your situation)?  Do you know how many of your online leads are Hispanic?  How do you know your online ads are reaching Hispanics?

Regardless of your situation, the need to identify, verify and score customers is real time is universal–regardless of industry.  At TARGUSinfo we see firsthand the power of being able to work with clients to help identify targeted audience groups to customize their messaging at every interaction.

Hispanics are online. Hispanics are among the fastest growing purchasers of goods and services today.  Hispanics are here to stay.

It’s a great event so far, and I look forward to learning more about the challenges facing the insurance market and how interactive marketers can help.
Rufus

@RufusManning

What a week!  Thanks to Rubicon Project, I had the good fortune of attending SXSW for the first time this year to speak on the “Smackdown: Consumer Privacy vs. Advertiser Revenue” panel.

With a very engaged crowd of people including publishers, advertisers and privacy advocates we were able to address the advertiser, consumer, governmental and industry perspectives on privacy and how to best leverage data to enhance engagement between advertisers and consumers without compromising sensitive information.

From the questions in the crowd, it is clear that folks are paying attention to this issue and good to see that the opinions are fairly well informed.  Consumer protection is something that TARGUSinfo takes seriously, and we are deeply engaged in developing best practices around leveraging data for enhanced advertising targeting.

Other panels at the event ranged from neuroscience and marketing to the potential impact of “old media” disappearing.  Sessions were a great opportunity to think more broadly about the changes taking place in society thanks to technology and the specific business opportunities that result.  Across the board, data plays a key part in the equation, from driving consumer insights to creating new ways to connect people.

Overall, it was a great year at SXSW for the interactive crowd with registrations up 40% and a total of more than 25,000 people visiting during the first weekend of the event.  From independent bloggers to deal-hungry VCs, it was a mixed crowd with one mission: connect with other smart people in the digital space… and eat good BBQ.

SXSW offered a great social networking function through the website that helped you find and connect with other people that were attending the same events.  In the evening hours, Foursquare seemed to be the app of choice for party hopping decisions.

If you decide to attend next year, which I highly recommend, plan early and often to make the most of your experience.  Hotels book early, and with so many people in attendance, it is helpful to have a core group of people to help navigate through the festivities.  Hope to see you there!

Ingrid

@Ingridsan

Despite the buzz about social marketing, the all too familiar “blackberry/iPhone buzz” I get about every two seconds means that  email still dominates our daily personal and business lives.

Granted, in many cases email aides the “stickiness” of social media by pulling us back in [think new follower notices or friend requests].  Email still endures as a direct connection to our relationships with brands we trust.

According to a survey released by StrongMail, 69 percent of business executives will increase their marketing tactic spend on email marketing— marking it the highest marketing tactic followed by social media with 59 percent.

This statistic is timely considering that last week my colleague Jason Ford and I attended the Media Post Email Insider Summit in Deer Valley (Dec. 6-9) to learn how a number of pioneering companies like Orbitz, REI, General Mills and ESPN treat the relationships they have with their customers via the email channel.

The summit was held at beautiful The Chateaux Resort at Silver Lake a facility and drew more than 150 attendees eager to learn about a number of industry topics including the wide ranging affect social media and other emerging platforms.

A point that was also highlighted in the day 2 keynote, “The Next Version of Customer Loyalty” by David Rosen, SVP, Strategy and Channel Development at Loyalty Lab, is the importance of knowing thy customer to improve long-term value of your acquisition and retention programs.

How do customers treat email with the emergence of Twitter and Facebook?  Is there a shift in the fundamental behaviors and attitudes towards email?  Do you have a clear feel for who your most ideal customer is and more importantly, how to reach more of them (both offline and online)?

Some of the key takeaways from the sessions:

• Social media is a conversation starter and a great channel to introduce yourself to the consumer, email can then work to enhance that conversation and grow the relationship
• It is a two-way street: consumer’s are now contributing to brands and value recognition
• Brands and consumers can interact through many channels but email is still king when a direct communication is needed
• When trying to understand your consumer doing so in real-time and providing offers immediately is key
• Consumers prefer to be targeted as individuals but want to control that dialogue

Overall Media Post put on an insightful conference that underscored the paradigm shift where consumers are further empowered to make choices when it comes to brands. 

I think David Baker from Razorfish has some good thoughts for improving the content for next year.

On the Interactive Markets team, we routinely are asked to help our clients better understand who their best customers and prospects are, where to find them and define the right messaging and communication avenues to win their trust, loyalty and eventual business. 

Don’t hesitate to reach out and contact me or the Interactive Markets team to see how we can help identify, verify and score your best customers and prospects.  Until then, I’ll see you on the road again soon.

Chris McArdle

@cjmcardle

You know you are at the right event when it is a standing room only crowd.    

digiday: TARGET, an event that brings leading agency, brands, content and technology companies to examine and explore the innovations and the future of audience targeting was held Tuesday in the elegant ballroom of the W Hotel Union Square with no room to spare. 

It was a follow up to the previous event in June and while just six months later, there has been a dramatic shift in the access, availability, and quality of the data that agencies and advertisers need to conduct a unified media audience buying strategy.

Six months ago, there was a lot of interest around enhanced targeting opportunities, but there were surprisingly few companies that were technically capable of incorporating and implementation the data necessary to drive the desire results.

At digiday: TARGET I presented a session entitled, “Spotlight: Making the Offline Connection” that focused on how advertisers can leverage offline data to better identify their best prospects, engage current customers or mobilize brand evangelizers in a privacy friendly way.  

This session drew on our ongoing experience working with many of the leaders in the space including ad networks like Collective Media, demand side platforms like Invite Media and optimizers like Rubicon Project.  Their clients are now actively using AdAdvisor to reach verified audiences.

From a quick glance at the attendee list for the event it was also clear that there is an increasing level of interest in data and targeting from brand marketers.  At least a quarter of the attendees seemed to came from leading companies like Kraft Foods, American Express, Starwood Hotels & Resorts and others.  It is exciting to see these advertisers actively involved rather than simply considering it the role of their agencies alone.

Data will dramatically change the way that brands find and engage customers.  By using verified data to identify, reach and analyze prospects and customers, brand marketers have an opportunity to dramatically improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of their marketing spend.

What makes AdAdvisor data unique and why you will continue to hear more buzz about our approach, is our ability to help brands understand the profile of their current customers through offline data analysis and create a direct link back to online advertising campaigns that exclusively reach people who are their ideal prospects. 

Our partners are currently deploying campaigns with custom audience groups for clients in education, finance, travel, electronics and others.  A number of our other partners are currently leveraging AdAdvisor for verified audience targeting against key demographics like age, gender, presence of children and home ownership.

As we head into 2010 and the next digiday: TARGET event in June, we look forward sharing more of our success stories.

Favorite quotes from the Tuesday:

“Applying data effectively at the bottom of the funnel gives marketers confidence to move up the funnel.” – Omar Tawakol, CEO, Blue Kai

“We need to create a marketplace for data that is potentially separate from inventory.” – Bill Wise, Vice President & GM, Display Platforms, Yahoo!

“DSPs will be the new Ad Exchanges, which were the new networks.” – Bill Wise, Vice President & GM, Display Platforms, Yahoo!

“It’s not just about data anymore; it’s about actionability…giving agencies the ability to do something with it, quickly.” – Sean O’Neal, CRO, Datran Media

“It is critical to approach the development of a data strategy as a collaborative process…you have to work in partnership with your data provider to really understand where the data comes from and how it was developed or you are likely to miss the mark.” – David Helmreich, Vice President, TARGUSinfo

Ingrid

@Ingridsan

What an amazingly busy first several months it’s been since joining the AdAdvisor team in early Spring 2009.

Audience targeting is quickly becoming front page news when less than one year ago it was far from common place.  SEE Media Post article: Online Display Ad Market Continues Shift To ‘Audience’ From ‘Media’ Sales.

We have been actively working on building verified audience targeting capabilities for companies throughout the ecosystem, including the leading ad networks, buy side platforms, optimizers, publishers and agencies.

Today, we just reached another milestone by announcing our relationship with Invite Media. Through this partnership, leading advertising agencies using Invite Media’s Bid Manager platform will have an opportunity to access AdAdvisor data in real-time through a streamlined web interface and apply this data against the highly liquid inventory sources of advertising exchanges.

“Media buyers want to get the control back and leverage verified audience data that they can feel and touch.  This is a giant leap forward,” said Nat Turner, president and co-founder, Invite Media.

AdAdvisor data provides a unique ability to drive scalable performance of brand advertising campaigns by helping agencies identify and reach new prospects that best resemble a company’s current customers.

Nat continued to say: “The integration of the TARGUSinfo AdAdvisor audience groups changes the game and allows our customers visibility to buy audiences that will produce the highest return.”

With access to thousands of potential targeting criteria such as travel habits, investment needs and brand preferences, AdAdvisor makes it possible for agencies to discretely identify the particular group of consumers that are most likely to be receptive to brand influences and respond to a given campaign.

I look forward to sharing more updates as we continue to gain momentum driving innovation in the digital landscape.

Ingrid
@IngridSan

Offline marketing professionals haven’t spent the past decades combing through your garbage to better understand consumers. Rather, they’ve turned predictive modeling of household segmentation into a science to send targeted messages and promotions via offline channels such as telephone and direct mail.

Anonymous Household Segment

This practice has established a clear path for online marketers to follow—anonymous offline household segmentation data can increase the effectiveness of your online advertising campaigns.

US household data is abundant and accessible, and the technology exists to integrate it into behavioral targeting campaigns.  Leveraging this information to improve campaign performance is something every marketer should be doing.

Behavioral targeting, and online marketing in general, is finding a great deal of success in boosting ROI and eliminating wasted impressions. However, it is not a perfect science. The missing link for online marketers is being able to establish a true link between user behaviors online and something more “tangible” in the real world that proves their actual purchasing behavior.

Solving this problem doesn’t mean having marketers staked outside your house and going through your garbage.  In the real world, every US household belongs to an anonymous segment based on non-PII information.

According to David Baker at Razorfish:

Audience profiling is becoming a real-time effort. Why is this important? You spend a lot of
money to reach and acquire new customers (for sales or publishing purposes) and rarely are you
validating the people you are targeting with any third-party source.—The Cost of Data

Creating online representations of these segments, bringing that offline visibility online, allows for customized creation of advertising, marketing and promotional campaigns.

Online marketers have traditionally used clickstream data to segment and target audiences. However, clickstream data isn’t necessarily predictive. You can get an idea of potential user needs and behaviors to help guide marketing efforts, but getting a more complete picture of your audience will lead to better campaign performance.

Factor in seasonality (ie; holiday shopping, back to school, etc) and finite interests such as planning for a wedding or preparing for a baby and your targeting results could be skewed.

Complementing behavioral targeting and other existing media programs with verified offline data such as anonymous behavioral data, buying patterns, demographics and lifestyle data can create more accurate household segmentation.

That segmentation applies across channels as well, and can be leveraged at every interaction with a customer (lead generation, call centers, point of sale, etc.). Integrating anonymous offline insight with anonymous online profile data rounds out household segmentation and facilitates the creation of custom segments to better improve revenue and efficiencies.

Encourage readers to check-out LeadCritic today and listen to his podcast interview with Paul McLenaghan regarding our new display advertising solution- AdAdvisor. 

Paul and Dave Helmreich have spearheaded the development of  AdAdvisor over the past 18 months.  Anyone with an interest in display optimization should check this out!

Dave

davidwengel@targusinfo.com

@davewengel

Today, Friday June 12 2009, is the day that analog service ends once and for all for broadcast television in the US. RIP analog, I’m not going to miss you.  However, a news story I heard this morning about the end of analog gave me one of those “huh?” moments that strike me at odd times…at least this time it wasn’t at 4am.

I was on my morning commute and tuned in to #WTOP (FM 103.5 in the Washington DC area) to get my traffic and weather update “on the 8s”.  As I was waiting for the next traffic report, they ran a story on the end of analog service and how many  households don’t have their digital converters and will be without signal.  In addition, even some people with the converter boxes are likely to receive  poor signals based on where they are located.   They quoted one gentleman from the Seattle area who said he was “relucantly signing up for cable and high-speed Internet service” as a result of not getting decent over-the-air signals for TV.

It was that last quote that almost made me spit out my coffee.  I realize that broadband Internet service typically cost more than dial-up, and if you have to choose between faster Internet access or feeding your family, obviously the responsible thing to do is the latter.  But if cost is not really a factor, then my theory as to why this fellow and others are reluctant to switch to broadband, or who don’t really use the Internet to get as much out of it as possible, is because they don’t have a great “user experience” while online.  I found myself wondering if he was one of those people who is turned off by the advertising online and if our industry plays in role in making him not an avid fan of the Internet.

This was really a troublesome thought brewing in my head.  In my opinion, the Internet is the single greatest technological and social innovation of the last 50 years.  We have access to seemingly limitless amounts of free content and free services, much of it paid for by advertising.  How could anybody not want to consume more and get faster and better access to all of this?

I am willing to bet that the Pareto principle applies, where the majority of page views and content consumption is done by a relative minority of the overall Internet population.  If this is in fact true, what are the reasons for it?  I would say that user experience plays a major role in the unevenness of  consumption across the population.  People don’t want to go back to websites if they don’t like the content or the navigatability of the site.  Much of that content and site navigatability can be greatly improved if advertising dollars are maximized and used effectively.

Advertising can and does play a significant part in the overall experience.  That is why it is incumbent upon all of us in the industry: advertisers, publishers, information services providers, technology companies, etc. to focus on making every every ad unit count by contributing positively to the user experience as well as addressing the needs of our clients.  The best way to accomplish this is to ensure that every ad is relevant and meaningful to the user in a privacy-friendly way.  This increases responsiveness to the ads as well as to more content consumption, which in turn leads to more advertising dollars flowing online.  We need to remember that, at the end of the day, the users are our industry’s largest constituency.   If we keep making them tune our ads out, soon they’ll be tuning out the content as well.