In the content world, we often discuss the importance of understanding our target audience, but I admit we don’t always explain what that really means. The phrase seems almost too simple, making it easy to assume we know what we’re talking about. It’s just the audience you’re aiming at—how tough can that be? While that’s somewhat true, the basic idea isn’t complicated. However, we overlook that just knowing basic demographics isn’t enough. Despite their value in traditional advertising, demographics alone don’t provide useful insights for truly reaching potential customers in a meaningful way. How can we create content that sparks an emotional or intellectual reaction when our target is defined as “male 20-34” or “household with an income of $100k+?” Marketing teams across various industries are using buyer personas to tackle this issue, but even these can turn into mere collections of demographic facts if they lack a deeper understanding of customers. We need to figure out what matters to the real people we want to sell to. We need to know what they care about. We need affinity data.
If you want to see why marketers should move away from demographics and focus on affinity data, just look at the typical ads during a nationally broadcast baseball game. Recent estimates show that women account for about 45 percent of baseball fans, yet the commercials during major network games are mostly filled with Viagra ads and spots for beer and trucks featuring stereotypical men doing manly things. Advertisers see “sports” and immediately target “males 21-54,” without considering what anyone, regardless of gender, who is trying to enjoy a live sporting event really cares about or what might catch their eye. I enjoy beer, and there are two full-size trucks in my driveway, so why do the ads for these products seem to overlook me (and nearly half their audience too)?
Baseball is maybe the most egregious perpetrator of demographic laser focus because it has the most gender parity, but it’s true of all major sports. Women make up a significant portion of every major sport’s fan base, and yet here we are with the same bromercials time and again. Even the Bud Light “it’s only weird if it doesn’t work” campaign (which I admit I love and think is hilarious and that actually started out promisingly gender neutral) has now become overwhelmed with men in their mid 20s to early 30s as the campaign has continued. This was the perfect concept to show a huge variety of sports fans of all kinds of genders and ages and races and team affiliations, and it got whacked with the Hammer of Demographic Targeting and lost the focus on affinity that is actually at the core of what makes it a successful campaign. Sports fans relate to the concept of being so intent on your team winning that you start doing ridiculous things because maybe they’re secretly helping. It’s irrational and we know it but trust me, as a sports fan, I relate to it! So why do I not see anyone other than young adult men as the focus in these commercials? The demographics don’t matter. A twenty-something guy who is more interested in video games than sports doesn’t relate to those commercials. He doesn’t care. But a thirty-something woman who loves sports is going to get it. Until she’s quietly told that the commercial’s not for her.
Fundamentally, marketing to demographics is marketing to stereotypes. It assumes that if you’re a certain age or gender or race, you must be a certain way. The problem, as anyone who lives in the real world with real people can probably already identify, is that people don’t always fit these stereotypes. A statistical majority of a given demographic group may not even fit the stereotype. Not only are you not targeting all of the people you think you are accurately, but you could be inadvertently alienating people that should be part of your target audience by excluding them because they don’t fit the demographics that you’ve conflated with a given affinity group. What people have chosen to associate themselves with, whether it’s a sports team or a hobby or some particular belief structure, is far more significant to them than arbitrary demographic groups they belong to by virtue of genetics or date of birth. Somewhat ironically, the actual leagues behind the most popular sports in North America have done an increasingly good job of showing their fans to be a wide array of ages, races, and genders in their own commercials, focusing on the memories created and the togetherness and community of their fans. The affinity group. Too bad their sponsors can’t seem to figure the same thing out.
While acquiring and using raw affinity data is not yet as dead simple as it undoubtedly will become, Google will get there, using information about what people have searched for, what they’ve sent and received emails about, even places they’ve physically been with their Android smart phones in tow. This isn’t measuring shallow data, and it isn’t measuring trends that will come and go and change almost as rapidly as we can accumulate and analyze the data. This is about the things people honestly care about, the things they spend time thinking and researching and talking about. While this information may take awhile to put together and make use of, it’s the type of information that will change at a very slow rate, because it speaks to the core of what people care about and what their priorities are. Take a cue from Google and not from outdated advertisers and start thinking right now about whether your target audience descriptions or your buyer personas are built on demographic data that’s not adding anything to your understanding of who you’re talking to, or affinity data that helps you understand what is truly important to these people. And hey, maybe for once, we can be a bit ahead of the curve.