Room 101: Knowing Your Most Powerful Motivations

It may seem that at times the creativity and passion behind the aesthetics of digital media are being overwhelmed by the language and numbers of analysing the financial return generated by digital marketing. This is a sentiment threading through the emerging data wars between aggregators and publishers, where the intent is to build higher propensities to purchase between the audience and the platform’s advertising (both search and display).

In this context, behavioural targeting (BT) is capturing the imagination and setting the agenda in terms strategies around the capture, storage and usage of data. An individual’s clickstream (including search history) and profile data are two BT prerequisites, sitting alongside ‘context’, as the preferred inputs for achieving this higher average purchase propensity (APP).

This APP metric, or something similar, will likely play a key role in positioning a publisher as a preferred media buy; a kind of ranking in terms of performance marketing.

However, if BT is a methodology which optimises an audience’s APP, can the rather creepy sounding concept of psychological targeting (PT) carry the APP metric to an even higher level?

The PT concept has its roots in netography, or more simply, the enthographic study of the psychology of online audiences, as defined by their comments, opinions and general contributions to online forums. In other words, defining or profiling an individual by how they communicate their impressions, motivations, opinions, knowledge, expectations, desires, wants and memories.

An example of its application would be User A’s behavioural ‘clickstream’ indicating a preference for luxury model vehicles (see above diagram), reinforced by his frequency of inquiry, both of the review section and finance calculator. However, while this behaviour indicates a higher propensity to purchase the latest Mercedes model currently being advertised, data which could be used to target User A in other non-related content areas (particularly run-of-site inventory), it’s still not a perfect correlation.

With the addition of psychological targeting, however, the proposed creative execution is further refined (i.e. personalised) for User A. Now, elements such as fuel efficiency and hybrid technology are explicitly communicated; a direct result of User A’s comments about these said technologies and how their consideration is crucial in any future purchase decision.

In commercial terms, this added ‘intelligence’ behind ad serving only inflates the media price, turning high volume, low performing space into a serious addition to premium inventory.

The delicious irony of this scenario is that as the analytics becomes more powerful, and more crucial to the propensity modelling behind advertising platforms, the creative element becomes more integral to closing the loop between exposure and consumer action.

In short, the creative element itself is actually contributing to an even higher APP; without it, the full power of audience targeting will never be realised.