Media planning

Media planning

Media planning is generally the task of a media agency and entails finding the most appropriate media platforms for a client's brand or product...

 is a science and one that has seen growth and increased discipline over the last few years through the introduction of new technology. These technologies have morphed from audience segmentation

Audience segmentation

Audience segmentation is a process of dividing people into more similar subgroups based upon defined criterion such as product usage, demographics, psychographics, communication behaviors and media use. Audience segmentation is used in commercial marketing so advertisers can design and tailor...

 to audience profiling, but the most recent wave of technology to affect media planning is based on Audience Screening, which can be defined as the opportunity to purchase an actual audience online rather than impressions.

Purpose

Audience Screening incorporates a number of different technologies including behavioral targeting

Behavioral targeting

Behavioral targeting is a technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual's web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select...

 and the more advanced Conversion optimization

Conversion optimization

In internet marketing, conversion optimization, or conversion rate optimization is the method of creating an experience for a website or landing page visitor with the goal of increasing the percentage of visitors that convert into customers...

 platforms. Audience Screening allows the advertiser

Advertising

Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...

 to identify the audience represented from an impression on a network or a portal and determine if that audience member is more or less likely to act in response to an advertisement than the general audience. If the audience member is regarded as highly desirable, then the advertisements are exposed. If the audience member is not deemed highly desirable, then they are not exposed to the advertisement and the next sequential audience member is evaluated for desirability and match to the potential customer base

Customer base

The customer base is the group of customers and/or consumers that a business serves. In the most situations, a large part of this group is made up of repeat customers with a high ratio of purchase over time. These customers are the main source of consumer spending...

 for the advertiser. This process happens in fractions of a second and can be used to better qualify the audience, allowing advertisers to reach only those folks most likely to convert as well as the publisher to generate a higher cost basis

Cost basis

Basis , as used in United States tax law, is the original cost of property, adjusted for factors such as depreciation. When property is sold, the taxpayer pays/ taxes on a capital gain/ that equals the amount realized on the sale minus the sold property's basis.The taxpayer deserves a tax-free...

 for their inventory.

How it works

The technology behind Audience Screening is not new, but it does represent the evolution of traditional behavioral targeting. Behavioral targeting allows the publisher to identify and bucket groups of impressions together based on the audience profile and past traffic experience. Once an advertiser identifies the audience they are looking to reach, publishers can sell this inventory accurately. The problem with this model is that it is not as fluid and flexible as the web appears to be. The experiences and the profiles of the audience change quickly and are reactive to the environment around them, so the past behavior of an audience, though relatively accurate, is still flawed. The Audience Screen model actually identifies this information in real time and can be updated faster and with more detailed accuracy. Audience Screening takes into account audience profile data, preferably in conjunction with industry reliable sources such as Claritas or Simmons, and merges this with data referring to the page where the ad is shown, the category of the site and more recent events (i.e. News, etc.). In this way the audience member being potentially show the advertisements is evaluated based on more recent, timely data and positioned as either more or less desirable to an advertiser or more or less likely to become a customer. In addition, we can overlay the traditional targeting metrics such as frequency caps and successive messaging to determine the most effective model for reaching and converting customers while limiting budget exposure. It’s a higher reward, lower risk model which is becoming more effective as time moves forward.

The technology for Audience Screening is beneficial to the publishers because it allows them to further segment their audience without the weight of customer surveys and deeper analytics packages being overload in their existing inventory. The technology works simply with a pixel tag

Web bug

A web bug is an object that is embedded in a web page or e-mail and is usually invisible to the user but allows checking that a user has viewed the page or e-mail. One common use is in e-mail tracking. Alternative names are web beacon, tracking bug, and tag or page tag...

 being placed on the publisher’s site and a simple database feed being established whereby the technology owner can amass a wealth of information concerning past habits and click streams as well as the syndicated data sources being used to categorize the audience members, or potential customers.

See also

• Ad serving
  Ad serving
  Ad serving describes the technology and service that places advertisements on web sites. Ad serving technology companies provide software to web sites and advertisers to serve ads, count them, choose the ads that will make the website or advertiser most money, and monitor progress of different...
  
  
• Marketing
  Marketing
  Marketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments...
  
  
• E-marketing
• Internet marketing
  Internet marketing
  Internet marketing, also known as digital marketing, web marketing, online marketing, search marketing or e-marketing, is referred to as the marketing of products or services over the Internet...
  
  
• Conversion optimization
  Conversion optimization
  In internet marketing, conversion optimization, or conversion rate optimization is the method of creating an experience for a website or landing page visitor with the goal of increasing the percentage of visitors that convert into customers...
  
  
• Affiliate marketing
  Affiliate marketing
  Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts...
  
  
• Social marketing
  Social marketing
  Social marketing is the systematic application of marketing, along with other concepts and techniques, to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good. Social marketing can be applied to promote merit goods, or to make a society avoid demerit goods and thus to promote society's well being as...
  
  
• E-mail marketing
  E-mail marketing
  Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses email as a means of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing...
  
  
• Viral marketing
  Viral marketing
  Viral marketing, viral advertising, or marketing buzz are buzzwords referring to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of viruses...
  
  
• Promotion
  Promotion (marketing)
  Promotion is one of the four elements of marketing mix . It is the communication link between sellers and buyers for the purpose of influencing, informing, or persuading a potential buyer's purchasing decision....
  
  
• Direct marketing
  Direct marketing
  Direct marketing is a channel-agnostic form of advertising that allows businesses and nonprofits to communicate straight to the customer, with advertising techniques such as mobile messaging, email, interactive consumer websites, online display ads, fliers, catalog distribution, promotional...
  
  
• Spamming and E-mail spam
  E-mail spam
  Email spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email , is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. One subset of UBE is UCE...