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Yesterday comes the news that “Nielsen adds 55 million households to measure targeted TV ads better… Move could open much bigger market for individually targeted ads [1].” Basically, ad tech is trying to do to TV what they did to digital advertising. The concept of individually targeted TV ads is the exact opposite of what TV ads should be — a mass awareness medium, used by brand advertisers that need awareness for their brand and products. That means one message out to “the masses” works well; and that’s what it’s supposed to be.
But just like they wrecked digital advertising with the myths of behavioral targeting and hypertargeting, ad tech companies would now like advertisers to believe that targeting TV ads to individual users is a good idea — a new shiny object they should pay for. As we’ve already seen with digital ads, the hypertargeting did not result in better business outcomes for the advertiser, it only resulted in more money going into the pockets of the “ad tech oil” salesmen.
Jerry Daykin, EMEA Senior Media Director at GSK, put it best — “overtargeting, the scourge of marketing” in a tweet. That’s a great way to summarize what advertisers have been misled to believe by adtech companies that were selling data and targeting services. If you think about this for one more second, you’ll realize that “overtargeting” makes NO sense. Targeting and retargeting ads to people who already know the brand, visited the brand website, or even purchased from the brand before are like hitting up the 1% for more repeat sales, while missing the other 99% that do not know the brand, have not visited the brand website, and have not bought from the brand before. That pool of “potential customers” is nearly 100 times the size of the pool of “existing customers.” It’s really really hard to squeeze more sales out of the 1%.
Over the last 10 years, the pendulum has swung too far to the “digital as hypertargeting” side of things, at the expense of brand advertising that makes the other 99%, potential customers, aware of your brand and products (fills the top of the funnel). This has been observed, painfully, as customers being bombarded with tons of ads after they’ve already purchased the item. But no matter how many ads you show or how well-targeted the ads are, a customer will not “buy 5 quarts of milk, when their family can only possibly drink 4 quarts of milk each week.” Advertisers need to “wake up from the stupor of smoking too much adtech weed,” and see that they can’t squeeze more blood from that 1% turnip; they should shift dollars back to brand advertising — showing mass media ads to the other 99% — that will actually drive more business.
The “short-termism”…
