Let's Move on From 1:1

In his excellent OpEd in AdExchanger this week, David Nyurenberg speaks to the misplaced trust and faith in individual addressability. The technological advancements of the programmatic industry have enabled advertisers to cling to the promise of 1:1 targeting.

1. Select your ideal audience
2. Trust that your data provider has that exact audience at scale
3. Deliver the perfect message to the perfect audience every time

The reality? The data has never been reliable or scalable enough to delivery the promised results. Data and audience providers have always relied on audience extensions and blurry edges of segments in order to support the maximum media budgets.

Even massive platforms like LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook offer "audience network extension", and while each holds massive troves of first party data, the fidelity of that data in the outer reaches of an audience extension network is impossible to validate. Revenue trumps accuracy, and as long as an advertiser isn't complaining about their conversion metrics, it's not a problem.

Misplaced Incentives

The origin for precision targeting in performance marketing lies in the belief that better accuracy and precision will drive better conversion metrics. Lower CPAs, higher revenue.

The problem? The best performing channel has always been retargeting, which isn't a result of audience precision. It's a result of handraising. People who go to a website to explore a product set are more likely to buy.

3rd party data has always been positioned as "the accurate way to reach an audience," but when pressed, data providers often have said "it's more of a branding tool." The conversion metrics never really matched the promise.

Many advertisers have leaned on the trust in targeting accuracy - just get our brand in front of the right people and they'll buy. What is lost is that people don't just buy because they see a brand, they buy because they're enticed by the product. They see something new or interesting or relevant and explore the offering.

Consumers don't just want a brand to say "here I am!", they want a brand to entice them. It's less about seeking the people who want to buy with precision and more about being creative and using signals to reach potential audiences at scale with a message that is compelling.

The Opportunity Ahead

With cookies going away in the near(?) future, the opportunity is ripe for change. Instead of clinging to the 1:1 targeting folly we've been chasing for 15+ years, the industry should embrace alternatives.

AI-based contextual allows for strategic alignment of brand and content.

Geographic tendencies can align demographics and socioeconomic factors with the right brand.

Publisher content and data can be a boon for audience matching and contextual relevance.

Brands have ample 1st party data, and they may say "those are already my customers, how do I use that?" That data can be a goldmine for insights. Pulling out audience demographics and geographic profiles can lead to better filtering for audience segmentation at scale.

Brands want to sell product as scale, so matching a thoughtful, interesting message with the right audience segmentation and placement can improve overall performance. This opportunity should drive brands to embrace new forms of targeting and stop grasping to alternative IDs to get to that right person. It's about getting to many people at scale, and brands can achieve that through other means that are more effective and performant.

Let's lean into a new future of advertising rather than grasping on to replace past mistakes.