More eyeballs on more sites does not mean more customers
Reducing the number of sites your ad displays on from 400,000 to 5,000 wouldn’t make a single dent in performance. Path 51’s Simon Larcey explains why.
A good media brand is like a trusted friend for a marketer or media buyer – you’ve got a level of established trust that means you can rely on them to get the results you need, and you can believe they aren’t going to steer you wrong.
To continue the analogy, an unknown media destination is a stranger. That’s not to say they’re necessarily no good, but since you have no connection to them, you’d be a fool to blindly consider anything they say without further investigation.
And yet, in these days of highly fractured audiences, we’re seeing far more media being bought from these ‘strangers’.
When planning media in the old-school days, before the ‘data revolution’, you would choose a magazine, programme, location or newspaper where you knew a majority of your target audience would be, and advertise there to achieve your goals.
Very well said.
“…the success of a campaign is generally defined by the environment where the advertising appears. Chasing audiences using predominately inferred data is questionable, but targeting by environment will guarantee a large chunk of the advertising is seen by the type of person you are looking for.”
Is this satire?
The placement of an ad is just another data point. You’re right that using inferred data is questionable and that’s exactly what you’re doing when you use the placement to define an audience.