It Takes a Village — a Media Village
The “New Takes on Local Audience Targeting” panel this morning at Interactive Local Media 2008 demonstrated how the technology for identifying and targeting audience segments is growing by leaps and bounds.
Moderator Bobbi Loy-Luster kicked off the session by introducing comScore’s Brian Jurutka, vice president of marketing solutions at comScore (who we congratulate on his recent promotion). In his data-filled presentation, Jurutka started from a top-line perspective for online media spending. He said that although the growth rate for online media has slowed due to unfavorable economic conditions, it will still be above 10 percent.
Jurutka then discussed the audience segmentation approaches supported by comScore’s data, which include:
- Channel (or platform)
- Behavioral
- Attitudinal
- Geo-demographic
In addition, Jurutka highlighted comScore’s mobile data capabilities, pointing out that in the U.S., the 228 million mobile phone users outnumber the 189 computer users. With its recent M:Metrics acquisition, comScore M:Metrics is well-positioned to provide detailed user information on the mobile space. (For representative data from Jurutka’s presentation on the rapid growth of the mobile market, see the blog post by Michael Boland.)
Next up was Joshua Herman, Acxiom’s InfoBase product manager, who described the many features of InfoBase, which generates very detailed performance data on a variety of advertising in multiple media.
InfoBase provides a consistent data framework across multiple marketing channels. It works in conjunction with another Acxiom product, the Personix demographic profiling system. Personix has 70 predefined demographic group profiles (or clusters). Using these two systems together, advertisers can see how their ads are performing with any of these clusters.
The end game for this data and analysis is to keep the consumer ENGAGED with the advertiser. As Herman said, “It takes a village of media to connect to the consumer.”