Combining the Power of the Creative with the Power of Targeting

In my previous column about this I was critical of how much is spent on promotion relative to advertising and it39s worth a postscript here to suggest a way that promotion can be profitable more than 20 of the time as established by hundreds of IRI Behaviorscan studiesAn alternative to promotion in its current form would be more targeted promotion similar to a free sample but covering the costs and sent only to people for whom there is evidence that they have never tried your brand and they would probably like it a lot better than what they are currently buying The evidence might be that their motivations in life and their motivations in buying the category point in the direction of the kind of satisfactions you feel your brand deliversMotivations are the hook which enables the power of the creative to be combined with the power of targeting The highest ROIs will be achieved when targeting considers the motivations contained in the creative as well as the past purchasing pattern establishing which people are most likely to sales respond to the ad because they are already leaning in a bit to the brand but are not yet loyal to itFor example if you feel that you have the jammiest red wine in the world and you have eCom or frequent shopper card data from which you can identify people who buy jammy red wines that39s an example of targeting based on motivation in this case product motivationsMRI and Simmons have hundreds of product motivation questions in their database BRI started that Timothy Joyce and I introduced life motivations motivations that are not specific to a product category in TGI Timothy39s platform before he launched MRIThere is of course a relationship between life motivations and product motivations If for example you are highly motivated by a need to feel secure and safe then the appeal of cars that win endorsements for their safety record are for you if you seek sex you will want your toothpaste to do a good job on whitening and breath freshening and so onA few years ago when I was consulting for Simmons and Steven Millman was the Chief Scientist there and Pat Pellegrini the President we devised a means of using all the Simmons product motivation data plus RMT DriverTags as a means of determining life motivations to help a brand determine its creative strategy and brief to the creative agency You39ll recall that RMT is a company I cofounded with Bill McKennaOur work on the creative strategy began with an analysis of Simmons with DriverTags added at the respondent level to determine the overlap between a brand39s customers and its competitors39 customers From this the strategy decision was which competitors to take customers away from and then focused in on the life and product motivations of the customers shared with the targeted competitors The advertising executions would bring out those motivations as new attributes to be identified with the client39s brand or as existing attributes to refresh and remind This was the type of visual we used to plan such a strategyWe assume going forward that every advertiser will be allocating some budget to content targeting and some percentage to IDbased targeting After the executions are made based on the foregoing logic their placement in media can reflect the overlaps between product motivation and life motivation segments with specific television programs websites and IDs MRISimmons has information like this on relatively small numbers of programs and sites and demo lookalikes of such people on IDs at scale RMT and partner Semasio have deterministic life motivations on IDs and websites at scale and RMT has life motivations on thousands of TV programs networks and daypart rotations So today motivations can definitely be targeted both ways ID and content As compared to demo targeting a study presented at the ARF September conference showed that life plus product motivation targeting quintupled the drive to website for an advertised book An Audi study recently proved that semantic lookalikes work far better than demographics if lookalikes must be usedAs contexts come back into heavier usage as targeting tools it will also be useful to maximize ROI by ensuring that there is high motivational resonance between every ad and every context in which it39s placed as enabled by companies such as RMTErwin Ephron loved the terms Propensity Proclivity and Propinquity He applied them to targeting by saying that targets should be people who show all threePropensity How much do they spend on the product categoryProclivity Do they show signs of leaning into the brand but are not yet loyalPropinquity Will they be in the shopping window at a specific predictable timeNielsen NCS and Joel Rubinson did a study using past purchasing and shopping behavior to predict propinquity which achieved major lifts in ROITo summarize the takeaways of the two articles concluded hereUse motivations and competitive overlap to help determine creative strategyUse motivations movable middle and predicted shopping trips to target and time activation to specific segmentsMake sure that the motivations in the ad are congruent not only with the people you send the ad to but that the motivations in the contexts also resonate with the ad39s motivations as this has been proven to increase both sales effect and branding effectsThis admittedly is a tall order and does not mirror the quotstuck processquot by which most media are bought and sold today which is amazingly similar to the way it was being done when I entered the businessIf the CMO was held in higher regard within most corporations would that lead to better marketing effectiveness methods being easier to introduce As an industry we know much more about how it should be done than actually gets widely used and we have been tied down like Gulliver for half a century continuing to overspend on low CPMs disregarding quality factors and on promotionWhen the rare brand experiments with doing it the right way leveraging all that is known today to marketing science the results are always spectacularIf you missed it go here to read my prior post on these same subjectsClick the social buttons to share this content with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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Combining the Power of the Creative with the Power of Targeting

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