Big data can help decision makers learn a lot about customer preferences, attitudes, needs, and recent purchasing behaviors. So it’s only natural for advertising execs to hitch their wagons to the big data movement in their zeal to deliver relevant and meaningful promotions to more targeted groups of would-be consumers.
Industry experts say that advertising whizzes will increasingly use big data and analytics to sift through reams of consumer data to help identify the best ways to promote products to defined customer segments based on consumer sentiment that’s shared in social media and other channels. In a recent article about big data on Dawn.com, analyst Rob Enderle (@Enderle) describes how “analyzing data can tell you what resonates and what doesn’t.”
Analytics offers advertising companies and their clients the opportunity to develop highly customized campaigns for a discrete set of shoppers. By identifying and analyzing customers’ social sentiments as well as the solicited feedback they provide through online surveys, voice of the customer programs and other structured feedback mechanisms, advertisers can, with a greater degree of accuracy, develop promotions that are aimed at a specific subset of prospective buyers.
Big data is also being used by publishers to help boost advertising. A recent Ad Age article points to a group of publishers such as Conde Nast and Forbes that have formed private advertising exchanges to help boost display advertising rates. The story notes how big data is helping publishers in these private exchanges aggregate and boost sales of uncommitted inventory through real-time bidding.
In another example, The Financial Times (FT) uses big data to optimize pricing on ads by section, audience, targeting parameters, geography, and time of day. FT is also able to use big data to help reveal previously undersold areas of the publication to help optimize pricing and boost sales.
As a New York Times article points out, big data can also help political organizations develop and target ads at potential supporters based on where they live, their prior voting records, and the web sites they visit.
For example, Mitt Romney’s campaign team has recently run two different video ads promoting the Republican presidential candidate. One video ad is aimed at committed party members to encourage large turnouts at the polls. A second video ad is geared toward voters who have not yet aligned themselves with a particular candidate and is focused on Romney as a family man.
No doubt as the presidential race barrels forward we’ll witness additional examples of this type of microtargeting from both camps.
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