"Data-Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Jane Ostler, global head of media, insights division, at Kantar Millward Brown.
We live in a world that increasingly lacks nuance: Everything’s now an either/or. Politics has polarized, and so has marketing.
There’s an endless swirl of arguments about digital vs. traditional, AI or human, attitudinal or behavioral, brand-building or sales, targeting vs creativity. Proponents at either end of the spectrum portray one as good, the other as bad, veritable “mine is bigger than yours” contests, designed to grab headlines.
Let’s imagine for a moment that you could, in fact, have the best of both worlds, and look at the awkward, adolescent relationship between targeting and creativity.
Targeted communications can often be highly appropriate. For shifting inventory like hotel rooms or airline seats, targeting can be an efficient approach, but this needs to be balanced with finding genuinely new customers for whom you could meet a need, perhaps in segments you’re not yet familiar with. Each category will have its own balance. The key thing is to have a strategy and understand the impact of what you’re doing. And does the targeted communication resonate or relate to the rest of the campaign?
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