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8 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH March 2018 doi: 10.2501/Jar-2018-008
INTRoDUCTIoN
The emergence of increasingly quantifiable forms
of interactive digital advertising has resulted
in advertising becoming much more of a quan-
titative practice. While the so-called “perfectly
quantifiable” click emerged as a readily used
key performance indicator for digital-advertising
effectiveness, a new movement has been brew-
ing. Its adherents favor tracking every dollar and
every resulting action down to the pixel, only to
then optimize, analyze, and further optimize that
information to squeeze every last bit of advertising
return on investment from the dollars allocated to
a campaign.
In search-engine marketing, where clicks mean
a great deal to the ultimate effectiveness of digital
advertisements, this makes sense. In the display-
advertising ecosystem, however, the tendency to
optimize toward clicks makes little sense, given
that clicks have been shown to bear little correlation
to performance metrics such as conversion. Because
“not everything that can be counted counts, and
not everything that counts can be counted,” opti-
mization can be a driving force behind both good
and bad marketing performance. 1
As digital technology became more sophisticated
over the past decade, a new addiction emerged—
audience-based buying. The advent of program-
matic buying platforms made it easier and more
efficient than ever to buy digital inventory across
a website, on the basis of the associated attributes
of the Internet users exposed to a particular adver-
tisement slot. Rather than putting together a media
plan of sites that indexed high on consumers with
certain demographic characteristics, for example,
marketers now could target with laser-like pre-
cision to select audiences of consumers with a
1 J. del Rey. “Click-Through Rates May Matter Even Less than We
Thought.” AdAge, April 24, 2012. Retrieved December 12, 2017, from
http://adage.com/article/digital/click-rates-matter-thought/234330/.
particular behavior (e.g., buyers of the brand). One
reasonably could expect that concentrating adver-
tising frequency on these consumers could help
increase repeat purchases.
The move toward hypertargeted advertisements
deployed for maximum efficiency might seem too
good to be true. Like many quick fixes that achieve
a short-term stimulus, however, the long-term
downside not only can be detrimental to a brand—
it can be fatal.
DIgITAl TARgETINg: CoSTS vERSUS BENEFITS
The largest brands in the world recognize the perils
of overtargeting audiences at the expense of tried
and true mass-reach strategies. Marc Pritchard,
chief brand officer of Procter & Gamble, admitted
as much in a 2016 interview with The Wall Street
Journal: “We targeted too much, and we went too
narrow… and now we’re looking at: What is the
best way to get the most reach but also the right
precision?”2 Pritchard’s observations support an
argument in favor of a balanced approach—one
that acknowledges the benefits of quantitatively
data-driven targeting approaches without losing
sight of that mass-reach approach that brands have
relied on for decades.
Many brands, nevertheless, increasingly are
being drawn to the immediate benefits of tar-
geted advertising. The question becomes: At what
long-term cost? Ultimately, there are better ways
to use targeting data today, whereby brands can
drive both short-term performance and long-term
outcomes. These objectives need not be mutually
exclusive, and brands must get smarter at how
they deploy available targeting data if they expect
to drive both results simultaneously.
2 S. Terlep and D. Seetharaman. “P&G to Scale Back Tar-
geted Facebook Ads.” The Wall Street Journal, August 17,
2016. Retrieved December 12, 2017, from https://www.wsj.com/
articles/p-g-to-scale-back-targeted-facebook-ads-1470760949.
Are You Targeting Too Much?
Effective Marketing Strategies for Brands
gIAN M. FUlgoNI
comscore, inc.
gian.fulgoni@comscore.com
Numbers, Please
March 2018 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH 9
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The Perils of Targeting Too Narrowly
Brands that rely too heavily on targeting
may meet short-term sales objectives while
the long-term health of the brand suffers.
Les Binet and Peter Field, in The Long and
the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term
Marketing Strategies (Binet and Field, 2013),
found that “the way in which long-term
effects are generated is fundamentally dif-
ferent from how most short-term effects
are produced. Although long-term effects
always produce some short-term effects,
the reverse is not true and long-term effects
are not simply an accumulation of short-
term effects.” Sales-volume effects can be
stimulated with targeted, rational appeals,
but pricing effects that correlate with long-
term brand performance are achieved better
through “fame” campaigns that have mass
appeal and emotional resonance.
Byron Sharp, marketing professor at
the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, University
of Southern Australia, also is well-known
for his critique of brands that focus their
message on the same consumers. “Sales
growth won’t come from relentlessly tar-
geting a particular segment of a brand’s
buyers,” Sharp said. “This fantasy is harm-
ing marketing effectiveness.”3 In his book
How Brands Grow (Sharp, 2010), Sharp
argues that consumers are not as loyal
to individual brands as many market-
ers might think and that for mass-market
brands to continually drive sales, they
must reach new buyers and lighter buyers
with their marketing message. Narrow tar-
geting does the opposite.
Brands may find that when they target
too narrowly, whatever gains might be
achieved with loyal or heavy brand buyers
easily can be outweighed by the erosion
experienced when a brand is not top of
mind among enough consumers. Unilever
3 J. Neff. “Losing Loyalty: The World according to Sharp.”
Retrieved December 12, 2017, from AdAge website: http://
adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/the-world-according-to-
byron-sharp-customer-loyalty-cheating/309532/.
Chief Marketing and Communications
Officer Keith Weed put it succinctly: “If
you get too targeted, you reinforce people
who love your brands to use more…[but]
there are only so many cups of tea you can
drink in a day.”4
It is important to note that the effects
of overtargeting might be lasting. Brands
focused only on stimulating short-term
sales might do so at the expense of long-
term brand equity and cultural awareness.
In his experience of working with some
of the world’s largest brands, Mediacom
Executive Chris Binns said, “We see that
the more precise you are with your target-
ing, the more you run the risk of optimiz-
ing yourself into a sub-optimal position.
This is not to say that precision doesn’t
work, but that there are some ‘red flags’—
the most significant of which is that invari-
ably the individually precise is culturally
invisible.”5
Mass-market brands must pay heed to
metrics of brand equity, such as awareness
and favorability. Absent availability and
affinity in the mind of enough consumers,
brands will struggle to grow and maximize
profits. Narrow targeting can walk a brand
right into this trap.
Rethinking Reach
Brands tossing all their eggs in the tar-
geting basket either may be seduced by
the siren song of precision data to power
their media buys or may take the path of
least resistance in the fragmented modern
media environment. Buying media that
reach a high percentage of the population
relatively quickly was much easier in the
predigital era of limited commun ication
alternatives.
Although television remains the king
of reach vehicles, marketers’ television
4 J. Neff. “Losing Loyalty: The World according to Sharp.”
5 C. Binns. (2016, September 19). “Precision Targeting
Has Gone Too Far.” Retrieved December 12, 2017, from
Campaign website: http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/
precision-targeting-gone-far/1408723.
dollars must work harder and harder to
reach the same audience. Certain audi-
ences cannot be reached quickly with
television, and some audiences cannot be
reached at all—particularly the elusive
millennial audience, who have shifted so
much of their collective screen time toward
digital platforms.
A 2017 study by Omnicom agency
Hearts & Science found that a staggering
47 percent of adults ages 22 to 45 years do
not watch television content in the tradi-
tional manner, instead opting for digital
video or over-the-top (OTT) viewing.6 Not
only are these viewing options less likely
to be advertisement supported—more
than one-third of total OTT household
viewing time is on Netflix7—but those that
are advertisement supported tend not to
carry full-length advertisement spots, as
happens in linear television.
Further compounding this problem is
that these “unreachable” audiences are
adept at tuning out advertising to which
they actually might be exposed. When
they do watch television, they often reach
for their mobile devices during commer-
cial breaks.8 When they are online, many
use advertisement-blocking technologies.9
Brands increasingly must confront the
reality that some of their most sought-after
audience segments might offer but brief
slivers of media availability in which they
can be reached.
6 J. Poggi. “Nearly Half of Millennials and Gen Xers don’t
Watch any Traditional TV: Study.” AdAge, September 22,
2017. Retrieved December 12, 2017, from http://adage.com/
article/media/half-young-consumers-watching-content-
traditional-tv-study/310564/.
7 comScore. (2017, August). “Share of Total Viewing Min-
utes, U.S.” [OTT intelligence].
8 G. Abramovich. (2017, October 3). “Most Millennials
Second-Screen during TV Commercials.” Retrieved Decem-
ber 12, 2017, from the CMO by Adobe website: http://www.
cmo.com/adobe-digital-insights/articles/2017/9/28/adobe-
media-habits-survey.html#gs.pgXzxYE.
9 eMarketer (2017, February 15). “eMarketer scales Back
Estimates of Ad Blocking in the US.” Retrieved December
12, 2017, from https://www.emarketer.com/Article/eMar-
keter-Scales-Back-Estimates-of-Ad-Blocking-US/1015243.
10 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH March 2018
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Mass Reach, Digitally Driven
How, then, should brands execute against
their marketing objectives in this cross-
platform environment? Is achieving mass
reach even realistic, and are brands smart
to continue turning their efforts in the
direction of more finely targeted audi-
ences? It is actually possible to do both.
There is an optimal mix that can be
tuned through trial and error, experimen-
tation, and iteration to land on advertising
that works to maximal effect. Measure-
ment is critical to finding the right mix and
should be done on a postcampaign basis
at a minimum and in flight whenever pos-
sible. The following measurement tech-
niques can be used to align and optimize
cross-media campaigns to help brands
grow over the near and long term:
• Plan media that overlap broad and
narrow targets. Media-planning tools
that combine broad demographics and
advanced audience targets allow plan-
ners to build a media plan on the front
end that can meet both audience objec-
tives. Planners can find efficiencies in the
types of media that overindex on reach-
ing both audience targets and “heavy
up” on those media to increase efficiency
of campaign delivery. More efficient
front-end planning increases the likeli-
hood that campaigns will be delivered
against the right audiences and that
reach and frequency objectives can be
met for multiple targets.
• Activate unexposed audiences on
television via digital. Television-
commercial ratings data can determine
which audiences were reached by a cam-
paign and which audiences were not.
Recent innovations in advanced audi-
ence segmentation and data activation
make it practical to identify unexposed
segments on one media channel and
find those audiences and their looka-
likes on digital media channels. Where
reach curves max out on television,
digital-media plans now can be quickly
activated to maximize target reach and
ensure more optimal media allocations.
Even in cases where brands opt not to
cast the widest net of consumers, this
same activation strategy can be used
to increase frequency among already-
reached audience segments, but in a
more cost-effective manner.
• Measure unduplicated reach across
platforms for broad and narrow audi-
ence targets. Once cross-platform
campaigns are delivered, brands must
evaluate their delivery holistically across
channels. Siloed measurement of each
channel might show satisfactory reach
within each individual channel, but,
because of high overlap within a par-
ticular audience, brands often are not
maximizing overall target reach. Holistic
cross-platform campaign measurement
helps brands improve the way they man-
age their media investments for boosting
incremental reach, to increase “cultural
awareness” of the brand among as many
consumers as possible. Delivery can be
evaluated against multiple targets, so
that a women’s athletic-apparel brand
could quantify, for example, that it
reached 60 percent of its broadly defined
target of women ages 25–49 years while
reaching 75 percent of its more specific
“yoga moms” target.
• Measure brand lift and sales lift for the
same campaigns. Brands rarely perform
multiple effectiveness studies for a sin-
gle campaign. If it is a branding cam-
paign, they tend to opt for branding-lift
studies, and if it is a short-term pro-
motion, they prefer to opt for sales-lift
measurement. Although doubling up a
research expenditure is not always real-
istic for small or medium-sized cam-
paigns, large cross-media campaigns
should prioritize measurement for both.
Brands get the benefit of understanding
how to develop creative content that
drives both brand and sales lift, on
which dimensions these factors corre-
late, and where they differ. Research-
ers have suggested that brands should
“pursue a balanced scorecard” (Binet
and Field, 2013) in measuring their
campaigns and that the optimal mix of
brand and activation (i.e., short-term)
expenditure is typically around 60:40.
New bodies of research have demon-
strated the synergistic effects of cross-
platform advertising campaigns. The
Advertising Research Foundation’s 2016
“How Advertising Works Today” research
proved that combining multiple platforms
in a campaign drove synergistic effects in
return on media investment (Snyder and
Garcia-Garcia, 2016). Research and met-
rics such as this help brands understand
the relationship and interplay of exposure
on different media platforms, offering the
insights needed to optimize their invest-
ments. Similarly, better measurement can
illuminate the synergies among different
—both broad and narrowly targeted—
segments to help brands plan their media
more effectively.
CoNClUSIoN
The tried-and-true marketing principles
of reach and frequency are just as impor-
tant as they have ever been. The media
environment has changed, however, and
delivering against these objectives is no
longer as easy as it was in the days when a
prime-time network-television buy would
suffice. Brands understandably want to
make use of more targeted data, though, to
reach the specific audience targets that can
spur sales at the cash register. The smart-
est brands realize both objectives can be
achieved simultaneously through more
sophisticated approaches to the planning,
activation, and measurement of cross-
platform campaigns.
March 2018 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH 11
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Nate Silver, noted statistician, prognosti-
cator, and founder of the website FiveThir-
tyEight.com, in an October 2017 Tweet,
said, “Figuring out *how* to optimize
something is mostly a math problem. But
figuring out *what* to optimize is mostly
not.”10 Because digital advertising came
of age amidst a vast ocean of measurable
data, there has been a temptation to use
“math” to optimize for specific outcomes.
The problem is that few ever stopped to
ask whether these were the right outcomes
to optimize, and in many cases they were
10 Nate Silver (@natesilver538). (2017, October 20). Tweet.
Retrieved January 8, 2018, from Twitter: https://twitter.
com/natesilver538/status/921385309157363712?lang=en.
not. They biased toward short-term results,
often at the expense of the determinants of
long-term brand success, such as aware-
ness, cultural relevance, favorability, and
loyalty.
Such misguided thinking can be
reversed. Although data partially may be
to blame for the problem of brands target-
ing too narrowly, with better data-driven
measurement practices, data also can be
part of the solution.
aBout tHE autHor
Gian M. Fulgoni is cofounder and chairman emeritus
of comscore, inc. Before his career at comscore, he
was president and chief executive officer of Information
resources, inc., amid more than 40 years at the c-level
of corporate management. Fulgoni over the years
has overseen the development of many innovative
technological methods of measuring consumer behavior
and advertising effectiveness. He is a regular contributor
to the Journal of Advertising Research.
rEFErENcE
Binet, L., and P. Field. The Long and the Short
of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing
Strategies. London: Institute of Practitioners in
Advertising, 2013.
Sharp, B. How Brands Grow: What Marketers
Don’t Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010.
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Copyright of Journal of Advertising Research is the property of Warc LTD and its content
may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright
holder’s express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
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