Mass Personalization Over Mass Marketing
This guest post was contributed by Kevin Mallon, Partnership Manager at AdParlor.
It’s February. For most of us, by this time of the year, our resolutions have gone out the window, and we have reverted to the old habits we swore we would move away from. It's the same in digital advertising. Like clockwork, companies are falling over themselves to splash out on big, expensive ad campaigns that will likely not improve sales or awareness for their brand. Even worse – these campaigns may run the risk of offending their target customer when they launch them.
So why keep doing it? Here we are, 100 years after John Wanamaker famously said that half of advertising dollars are wasted on ads that just don’t work, and marketers are still wasting money by showing the same ad to their entire audience.
We know what successful ads look like now, because we can quantitatively measure their success. What is the secret to a successful ad? It’s that a great ad looks different for everyone. Mass personalization in advertising works more effectively than mass marketing. Period.
You heard me correctly. That $10 million ad you just commissioned? It’s not going to work for most of your target audience! But you’ve read Wanamaker, so you already knew that, right? So you are probably already focusing on mass personalization in your advertising campaigns. If not, then it’s time to change the terrible habits from mass marketing in your digital advertising campaigns.
Still need proof? Last year, AdParlor performed deep dive analysis on more than 50 large digital media advertisers. The results were astonishing: Most of these companies had wasted between 20 percent and 50 percent of their 2017 social media spend. One of the main culprits behind this waste was ineffective creative. After some digging into why, we found that most of these advertisers are still signing off on creative by consensus, rather than by data.