Let's stop talking about "behavioral"

Return to What media buyers don't know is killing them

I've written before that I don't accept the industry definition of "behavioral" …well, behavioral anything. This caused some amusing anecdotes to come from our ad placement research and resulting tool development. Icon International's Jim Meskauskas (also the media strategies editor here at iMedia) commented:

"Given that targeting online can be done behaviorally, it isn’t always necessary to have 'hard' demos to use for the purposes of target identification. In particular, the income demo select. Being able to have a 'Not Applicable' select for any demographic category would be good.  Sometimes things like income or number of children don’t matter."

I completely agree with Jim's comment as far as the industry understands behaviors, not so as people manifest behaviors. The difference deals with another $25 term I mentioned earlier, significance effects. The basic idea of significance effects is that the more exposure a person has to a logo or brand (for example), the more meaning that logo or brand has to that person. An example of this can be found in John Timmer's post The Psychology of Banner Ads.

How significance effects work is based strongly on things like size of household, income and several others. For example, an individual is considering a car purchase. Knowing that the individual earns US$65k/year and supports three children and a life partner or that the individual earns US$65k/year and is single is going to influence how they make decisions, hence whether or not the significance effects are positive or negative and where they need to be in the visual field so that they'll always be positive and never be negative.

The goal, of course, is to both create and place ads that drive action. This is done once there is sufficient recognition and reference in the target audience's mind to associate clicking on an ad with a desired, favorable outcome.

Again, gaining recognition and reference can be achieved many different ways. Knowing a great deal -- psycho-socially and psycho-culturally -- about your target audience can better your chances of placing your ad (even if you don't know much about it from a creative standpoint) where its significance to that audience will be highest.

Independent studies from Aalborg University and NextStage indicate that consumers see so many ads in a given web-day that media buyers and planners have only a few moments to generate attention and meaning.

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Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. Read full bio. He was recently selected as a senior research fellow and board advisor for the Society for New Communications Research.