Aldon Hynes and I are on the same page. I don’t know Mr. Hynes, but in his post in digiday:Daily discussing Stephen Baker’s talk at the digiday:Target conference in New York yesterday he is scratching his head over the possible limits of the data targeting thing online, and I know that feeling.
As reported by Hynes, two very important points got made by Stephen Baker in his address at the conference: 1) If you talk about targeting people they will feel invaded, but if you talk about customized service they will feel rich; 2) there aren’t enough agency creatives in the world to accommodate all the targeting that might derive from the availability of online data with customized messages. Ergo, advertising is left to think and act at a group level.
The first point has especially strong ramifications: if you can whittle down to nearly me with all your targeting, then the opportunity better be a good one, made to order and fit. If you whittle down to me and the offer is, simply, come on in for a test drive, I may decide to move where you can’t find me. This places a considerable burden on marketers once they connect with a finely-tuned audience. The offers need to be customized.
Hynes turned to playwright Tom Stoppard to help make a broader point about current rage over data:
“It reminds me of a great line from the play Travesties by Tom Stoppard. In it, a Dadaist artist has a wonderful line to the effect, “It is the responsibility of the artist to laugh, and jeer, and howl, and belch at the common delusion that infinite generates of causes can be inferred from effects.”
And he suggests:
Perhaps creatives at ad agencies need a little more Dadaism in their own work. Instead of targeting fifty year old white males of a specific education and income level in Woodbridge, CT that own a dog, a cat, a hybrid, and have children in gifted education programs, they should target people that want to feel like they are accepted and belong to some group, people that are concerned about the economy, people with complicated emotional ties to their families, people that feel a little self-conscious when someone seems to stare at them from across the room…or so many other demographics that don’t really narrow things down very much but instead reflect the human condition.”
Of course, reflecting the human condition in enough detail to tell one shape from another has been the Internet’s most compelling media planning feature since the beginning. The Internet is ”brought to you” by the human condition. This is true of all media (a great reason to be in the business), but offline the human condition is available in a few standard programming sizes. Online, the human condition is available in all sizes.
Aldon Hynes raises the point that the human condition is largely about sharing and belonging. By design, however, data takes people out of their groups and reconstitutes them. In the process it is hard, if not impossible, to replicate the experiences and preferences that brought audiences together in the first place - around a web site, or a blog or social group - in a way that shares the value of their human condition with the advertiser.
J.C. Herz made much the same point in 2001 in the Industry Standard:
“The richness and complexity of an online experience, like the richness and complexity of a city, is created by the people who live there as they engage with the place and each other.”
Data can surround the advertising plan, but to achieve real results the advertising plan must surround the human condition.
