The need for reaching specific consumer segments with focused messages has never been greater, but according to the Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB), the industry must take a hard look at current practices and quantify the financial implications of out-of-segment placement of digital advertising.
Marketers have gravitated towards digital media channels as the primary way to implement personalized marketing and have been benefiting from the resulting financial returns. However, the industry’s main vehicles for delivering segmented audiences have recently been facing substantial headwinds.
Preliminary research by MASB and Truthset across 16 data providers demonstrated substantial disagreement in demographic profiles used for campaign segmentation. This will only get worse with the phasing out of third-party cookies, expansion of commercially sponsored consumer anonymity programs like Apple ATT, and data-sharing evasion by younger generations.
In the research, gender, age range, and other basic demographics for a large sample of consumers were drawn from sixteen leading digital targeting data service providers. Shockingly, agreement among them on gender was only 51% for the 16 providers. For age ranges where more options were available, the agreement was only 7%. This initial investigation demonstrated that there is a great disparity in segmentation groupings generated by different suppliers utilizing basic demographics, let alone the more complex behavioral, lifestyle, life stage, and interest attributes.
Marketers are invited to participate in a new research initiative on targeting accuracy return on objectives and investment. MASB and Truthset are partnering again to conduct rigorous experiments with data from recently completed and soon-to-be completed client campaigns to quantify targeting accuracy and the resulting impact on marketing objectives and financial returns.
Participating marketers will receive the results for their own targeted campaigns and aggregated comparison benchmarks from all participants. The objective is to equip marketers with this valuable information within the 2023 calendar year to inform campaign planning going into 2024.
To schedule a meeting to discuss participation, please contact MASB Executive Director Frank Findley, frankfindley@themasb.org, or Truthset Vice President of Client Partnerships Wes Waterston, wes@truthset.io.