In days of yore, print magazine publishers conducted detailed surveys of their reader bases, including questions about brand preferences. Magazine salespeople would then dive into this data when selling advertising packages to brands.
Bringing in the big spend was about more than passing over a rate card and railing off inventory openings—it was about guiding advertisers through the characteristics and interests of their customers, and then tying those to brand business objectives.
With the advent of digital media and programmatic auctions, many advertisers became convinced of the otherworldly power of their own first-party data—intent, purchase, site visitation, you name it. They proceeded to chase cookies around the web, even ignoring publishers’ lovingly crafted digital segments when employing private marketplaces. As the buy side anointed its audience data king, publisher contextual and audience insights were left out in the cold.
Thankfully, what’s old is new again: as programmatic markets mature and high-value targets require more effort to message, advertisers are realizing the limits of their own data. Once again they’re keen to hear publishers’ audience stories.
But telling your audience story and truly serving as a consultant to advertisers these days requires advanced tactics: namely connecting data across various platforms, leveraging insights from external sources, and melding data with your advertiser.
Making a Good Audience Story Great
The first step is for publishers to ensure their own data is quality and composing a captivating audience story. As the path to purchase continues to grow complex, publishers who can leverage consumer insights in meaningful ways at scale are in the best position to become the best partners to advertisers.
A data partner can help you dig deep and further enrich your first-party data with third-party data. But this must go beyond basic demographics or purchase data—when a publisher can uncover what motivates and inspires people, they can help brands develop stronger relationships with their audiences and drive lifetime value.
Consider the generational nuances explored in Resonate’s State Of The Consumer Report 2019: Shattering Generational Perceptions. The rapid introduction of life-changing technology, as well as economic pinball action over the last few decades, has created stark differences in age group behaviors that you can weigh in your segmenting, according to the consumer intelligence SaaS provider’s report.
Conventional wisdom suggests millennials are elusive and don’t respond to advertising, so marketers tend to treat them as one monolithic group. Truth be told, there are differences between older millennials and younger millennials—they’re at different life stages, which ultimately impacts how, when, where, and why they buy.
According to the Resonate report, health, fitness, wealth, and success are important to all millennials, but older millennials tend to have kids, so their focus is on healthy family-friendly products. In addition, they tend to shop online, but pickup in store as they’re not interested in incurring delivery charges or waiting for delivery.
A data partner can help you dig deep and further enrich your first-party data with third-party data. But this must go beyond basic demographics or purchase data—when a publisher can uncover what motivates and inspires people, they can help brands develop stronger relationships with their audiences and drive lifetime value.
Meanwhile, Resonate finds that younger millennials are driven by self-creation and self-expression, and are in search of an exciting life that brings them wealth, influence and luxury. At the same time, they tend to be voracious deal hunters. Honing in further, younger millennials who’ve shopped for, or purchased Nike products in the past six months are nearly 3x more likely than the average adult online to have watched “The Late Late Show with James Corden.”
Armed with these insights, a publisher might lead a brand to create campaigns and experiences that tap into consumer values. For example, maybe enabling younger millennials to be product co-creators the way Nike does with NIKE BY YOU, where customers get to design their own sneakers both in-store and online.
Know Thy Advertiser’s Audience
Publishers who know their own audiences are good partners, but publishers who also know their advertiser’s audiences are even better partners. The truth is, your advertiser thinks they know their audience, but in reality, their data is limited. Sure, they may know what and when consumers purchase and possibly have some observed data from website interactions, but do they really know the humans within their audience?
Key to being a true data consultant is getting the advertiser (and their agencies) to share data. Even agencies have a hard time coaxing data out of their advertisers—and then getting it in a usable form. It’s no secret that many brands are finally grabbing technologies like consumer data platforms (CDPs) that will help them organize and make sense of their vast data stores.
As a publisher, you have a leg up. Your team has been crunching audience data for years, trying to better understand your audience and its interests. Just like in magazines’ heydays, you probably know the advertisers’ audience better than they do. The question is—how do you show your advertisers this, and then execute on it? That’s all about a data platform.
Bringing an advertiser’s data onto your publishing platform and relating that data so that it tells a better consumer behavior story is the recipe that strategic partnerships are made of. In combining data with your advertiser, your data platform needs to offer flexibility, because the right formula for data-melding will switch from advertiser to advertiser, from vertical to vertical.
The most potent ingredient could be purchase data, interest data, or some other type of data entirely. You have to know your data platform is more than a one-trick pony and can adjust to meet your ever-shifting needs.
The question that flummoxes many publishers (and agencies alike): how do you get advertisers to share data in the first place?
Also, a dirty little secret is that combining first-and-second party data through a data platform rarely creates enough targets to scale. The solution is amplifying that data and building lookalike audience profiles based on your audience data collection and analysis. Then you fatten those up with relevant third-party data a la your data platform.
The data partner won’t entirely solve the puzzle for you—and don’t believe the sales reps if they claim the platform can do this via third-party data—but it can fill in the missing pieces. Your data partner can help you draw the connections between audiences, discover insights hiding in patterns, and ultimately enable you to raise your relationship from seller to strategic partner.
Ascendance
The question that flummoxes many publishers (and agencies alike): how do you get advertisers to share data in the first place?
Let them peek under the hood at how you build your knowledge base and optimize campaigns. You can run test campaigns, potentially on a smaller scale, to demonstrate how your conjoined data (with a bit of smart third-party layering) can drive success. Key to success, though, is understanding an advertiser’s business objectives.
This is more than KPIs or acquisitions. Part of the data conversation is determining what kind of performance or actions they are trying to drive. Believe it or not, advertisers aren’t always forthcoming about this—or they’re not even sure what they desire beyond clicks and purchases.
Here’s another opportunity to play consultant, and further tighten your partnership. And the connections your data partner can draw between audiences should help you highlight potential positive business outcomes. If you’re doing it right, your not only helping their marketing efforts but also aiding them past transactional roadblocks.
This article is the third in a three-part article series: