From people to interest centric

The next wave of marketing

The last 10 years in digital marketing were driven by ever-improving targeting options. Lookalike audiences and retargeting options enabled a super fast, convenient and easy way of making sure that ads were seen by the right people.
On the other hand did the data-driven ad-tech industry comparatively little to help marketeers to create better copy and creatives.
Driven by a new wave of privacy regulations (from GDPR to Apple’s ATT) promoters now see a substantial decrease in efficiency and effectiveness of their proven targeting options.
It looks like they are slowly starting to regret spending 10 years making 50% of campaigns better and ignoring the other half.

It’s time to have a look why content is more important than ever before.

Content is the future?

In essence, marketing was people focused. The ad-tech industry measured and tracked individuals. Tried to understand them. For many industries this worked great. Better than anything before. In fact, it worked so good that whole industries were built on it. Remember the D2C trend and companies like Dollar Shave Club or Casper? Those were fueled by direct response ads on Facebook.
They were powered by lookalike audiences and retargeting campaigns. Measuring individual user behaviour, identifying the most successful conversions and tasking Facebook with finding more of the same people.

Against the backdrop of expanding privacy regulations, the future now lies in centralisation for some big platforms. Serving ads and converting users directly on the same platform will be the gold standard of the future. Nobody (not even Apple) is going to stop this technically. But to be able to serve targeted ads you need to have a lot of content allowing you to observe user behaviour and interest.
Eric Seufert put together a great overview of the changes to the ad-tech ecosystem and what content companies (especially gaming) can do next¹. He chose the term >>content fortresses<< and underlines that this may work for big gaming and other content platforms where activity AND conversion can happen on the same platform.
The way the industry is currently set up, this is not a tenable solution for promoters – probably not even the biggest ticketing platforms – as they lack the content usage of users to gain enough insights into peoples interest.

And what about promoters?

For promoters targeting worked always differently and was more difficult ultimately. Because taste in music is much harder to grasp and to describe. A concert is in most cases a one-time happening, making it near impossible to have enough time, iteration cycles and budget to get into the sweet spot of the advertising feedback loop.

As powerful as Facebooks understanding of their users is (and they are the best in that category by far!), they are not good at understanding music taste. People are willing to let friends choose a restaurant for example but are way less comfortable to let people buy them concert tickets without knowing for which music or artists. Taste in music is more diverse and personal than most other things.

Promoters therefore went back to traditional segmentation methods and are relying on socio-demographic data to cluster audiences and fans.
That this works even less should be obvious by now. There is this famous example of Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne:

If you look at segmentation features usually used by promoters like age, gender, post code etc. you see that they do little to help you decide who to target for a specific show or event.

What’s next?

Netflix were one of the first to openly share their reservations about this. They started focusing only on peoples interest instead of the people themselves.
This interest-based approach segments interests NOT people. It enables to describe the diverse interest fans have. They can be interested in a symphony concert with a famous french female violinist but also in the next upcoming metal wunderkind playing his or her first gig in the small club next door.
Traditional customer segmentation methods do not support this diversity of music taste.

The obvious answer for promoters is to design systems that only focus on interest and to cluster based on fans’ interest. The powerful ad networks of today enable targeting those interests.

Knowing WHY people are interested gives promoters an edge over big platforms as they get more independent from ticketing and ad platforms because switiching between them is easier. If you know why people are interested and what message they need to see to purchase a ticket or subscribe to an offer, you can decide on which platform to focus on.

What to do about it!

Marketeers must shift their focus towards understanding and targeting interest. It enables superior campaign efficiency due to better targeting and the possibility to match creative to targeting criteria – all automatically.
It increases independence and enhances the speed in which promoters can adopt new and upcoming platforms.

Interest centric marketing will be one of the most important strategic levers for marketeers who do not own a content fortress. Many industry need to speed up their efforts to catch up and rework their whole ad-tech stack.
Promoters can now finally leverage their past disadvantage (very, very diverse „content“) into a powerful advantage. The more diverse the content, the better the understanding of fans taste and interest.