Our media strategies editor lays out five tactics that can help you find small, hidden website gems for your online media plan.
Over the course of the last few weeks, I've talked about ways to find media properties that can bring smaller sites with high concentrations of a target audience to your online media plan, sites that might not always come first to mind when you are putting the plan together.
With the time constraints many agencies are operating under, it isn't always easy to move beyond the tried, true and well-known sites that rise to the surface of NetRatings or comScore runs. But the web is vast and wide. It is, in fact, worldwide; it is a world wide web, after all!
The big well-branded site buy is important when the need is to get mass reach quickly. With a Yahoo! Home Page takeover or a day-long road block on Weather.com, you can rapidly build vast exposure for an advertiser.
While big reach is important for building enough mass to make a business move, one of the greatest features of the web is the ability to aggregate large audiences using smaller vehicles. The web is a hot bed of passion places -- an embarrassment of niches -- that gives voice and home to audiences discrete to the point of nearly atomic segmentation.
Following are five tactics to use that will help you find the small, hidden media gems that exist on the web and could potentially give your client far bigger bang for far smaller out-of-pocket buck.
1. Composition over coverage
I spoke to this in detail last week. When using available syndicated third-party research to find the sites that might be most appropriate for your client's advertising, take a look at composition index rather than the reach the site might have against your target.
The index represents the likelihood of the site consisting of your target audience versus that target audience's presence on the web as a whole. If a site has only a few percentage points of reach but a unique visitor index of 200, that site is twice as likely to consist of your target audience as the overall web. Like I pointed out last week, Advertising.com, Yahoo and ValueClick are the top three media properties that reach women ages 25-54 with children in the household; but Blackamericaweb.com, Allure, and Parenting.com are the top three sites having an audience composition of women 25-54 with children in the household (March 2007 comScore).
2. Dispense with demos
Instead of looking for sites through the spyglass of demographics, try using straight product usage or surveyed declarative data to match media usage with a potential target audience. If you are advertising cheese, then you are interested in talking to anyone who has identified themselves as a cheese-buyer. While this kind of behavior may marry to a demographic, it is a propensity to consume a product that should identify a prospect, not their age, sex, or income level.
By looking at potential media vehicles this way, you might just find a site that you'd never have thought of… were you seeking your audiences solely using demographics.
This is, of course, the value proposition of behavioral targeting.