Q: I heard that I should advertise to all potential buyers of a category – heavy, medium, even light – because so many category buyers are light buyers.

A: For many big brands it can make sense, particularly when the messaging is broad “Tide cleans clothes best.” And it’s true that brands have found themselves over-paying for micro-segment targeting. But, there are some weaknesses to this theory. 

1) It’s expensive. Reaching everyone in the category is not an option for many firms for B2C and B2B because of resource constraints

2) A broad target necessitates a broad message; meaning that it’s difficult to be more uniquely appealing to everyone when competition chooses to serve a more specifically relevant message to a portion of the market. Your messages just don’t resonate as effectively. 

3)  We’re at a stage in marketing technology where I can actually develop specific messages to specific sub-targets, so it seems odd to universally endorse a 1950’s approach.  

So, we can a use cases where this does make sense, and as many scenarios where it is less helpful. The core concept of targeting is simply prioritizing the firm’s resources against the group of people who have the highest value to your firm.  

Q: What happens when cookies go away in 2022?

A: The easy question, eh? The truth, as of Summer 2021, no one really knows.  Google has an idea to create anonymized clusters of individuals with shared needs called Federated Learning of Cohorts  or FLoCs. Many other advertising groups are trying to create a “Unified ID” to replace the cookie. Brands are collecting 1st party data (customer data supplied directly to them) for use in targeting. And some see a big movement back to the “old” way of targeting – being where your audience is likely to be – what we call contextual targeting. At the end of the day, it seems likely that consumers will be asked to “opt-in” and share their data to access mote media. We should move to a more transparent exchange of consumer data that consumers and brands will benefit from. 

Q: One of my friends is a creative/I heard of this one famous campaign and they didn’t even have a brief and they created an amazing ad! So…what about that?

A – It absolutely happens. And it usually makes for a great story. The creative had this lightning bolt of an idea out of nowhere and it led to greatness, no thanks to strategy! First, let’s be honest. Are we hearing about the 99.9% of the times where there wasn’t a strategy and the teams spent 9 months churning because no ad “felt right” and they launched something dismal in the end? The point of the book is to dramatically shift our chances of success, to move the curve. We’ll still occasionally get a poor result, but through thoughtful strategy we’ll get a very good result more often, and dramatically increase our chances of getting those amazing, home run executions. Let’s move from “lucky” to “good.”