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Ryan: On today’s episode of Advertising America, we’re talking shotguns and sniper rifles. Is mass media a farce? Maybe. Should we be zeroing in on that perfect client avatar? Or is there another way to get the right people to do what we hope them to do? Buy all our stuff and suffer amnesia of our competition.

Here’s spray and pray Torbay, what do you have to say about targeting?

Mick: It’s important to talk to the right people. Best practices say, first reach the right people. I remember when I changed my relationship status on Facebook after my divorce. The next day, I started getting targeted ads. 38 and single, the headline read. That’s startling, who I, yes I am, why do you ask? Did I do a bunch of stuff that newly divorced dudes tend to do? You bet I did. Got a membership at the gym, bought a new car, and upgraded my barber.

I was in a demographic shift and there was stuff to sell me. Social is great at targeting. They know exactly how old I am. They know I’m married, again. They know I have children now. They know what I do for a living. If their algorithms are any good, they can probably figure out how much money I make and what kind of airplane I fly. It’s a Cessna 177 Cargo. If they didn’t know before, they do now. Probably because they’re listening on my phone right now… the bastards.

Knowing about your target audience is a good thing, but it’s easy to get bogged down in targeting. Are you really trying to appeal to a very narrow group? If you’re selling radios to pilots, yes you are. If you’re selling tires to car owners, no you’re not. Targeting a narrow audience is not an opportunity, it’s a curse. The airplane radio company has no choice, but you may have other options. Celebrate that. Remember what my colleague Stephen Semple, Direct Response Expert, said. By definition, it’s always more expensive to target. Who buys tires? Everyone, eventually. That means, he can advertise on radio and television for pennies on the dollar compared to a targeting campaign. If there’s any way your consumer could be considered everyone eventually, you get to choose the lower cost option for less money. Everyone includes more people. More people equals more opportunities to sell. That’s how companies grow.

Ryan: Thank you Captain Torbay, why did you go back to your barber?

Is your brother Chris the copilot when you’re flying together because he refuses to buy a plane or is it something else? Assistant Captain Torbay, what do you have to say about targeting?

Chris: Most people don’t need to concern themselves with targeting. Because most people misunderstand what targeting is.

Make no mistake. If you sell 16-channel mixing boards to recording studios, yes, you should target audio engineers. Don’t advertise on the Super Bowl, it’s a waste of your money. But that kind of narrow target is actually rare. Most brands and most companies have a pretty broad appeal.

You sell furnaces, you target people who need heat, which is everyone with a house. If you’re selling beer or soft drinks, you’re targeting everyone who is thirsty. If you sell cars, you’re targeting drivers. Where people are misled in targeting is when the digital companies tell you, Hey, you can target only people whose furnace broke down today. Zero wastage. It doesn’t work. Sure, that’s what pay-per-click does. You pay 200 bucks to be top of the list under “furnace repair near me”, and there you’ll be. And the homeowner who had no idea how to choose from a list of the top ten will choose you because you haven’t built a brand with the masses.

Apple doesn’t target people who decided to replace their phone today. They make people desire their products so that when they decide to upgrade their phone, they go for an iPhone. And the free-thinking, creative, cool trendsetter target that Apple creates to distinguish themselves from the squares who use PCs and carry Android phones, that’s all of us. It turns out their artsy and design-ie niche product, cell phone, is preferred by half the people on the planet. They don’t even shy away from being esoteric and everyone still goes for it.

The masses behave like the masses. And the more you think your customer is unique, the fewer people you have left to talk to. Throw a big net and haul in a boatload full of fish.

Ryan: Thank you, Captain Chris.

Fun fact, you know guys, fun fact nobody has caught more fish with a line than a net. See, we are out here teaching people how to fish

Ryan Deiss, founder of DigitalMarketer.com, has spent countless of millions of dollars testing impression-based campaigns against conversion-based campaigns on Meta recently. He’s only targeting the trade area of the company. This has resulted in significant brand impressions and a measurable lift in top-line revenue at a fraction of the cost of pay-per-click. It’s pretty impressive. So now what we’re talking about is getting social media acting more like a mass media. That’s pretty impressive.

As we start to shift here and we start to figure out what it is that we’re going to target or not target, strategies are changing, including on the socials.

Mick: I think one of the reasons why people have gotten so focused on targeting, especially in the last 5-10 years, is because it’s impossible. The truth is, when your only choices were television, radio, billboards, and newspapers, you couldn’t target. Everybody did all of those things, and so there was no way to target.

And as soon as somebody said, yeah, “we can find people who are five foot seven and make this much money”, then suddenly it became well, then therefore, you have to do that because you can. And I think we’re finding now that there’s a tremendous downside to that. Any time you target, any time you make your broadcast narrower, you are by definition talking to fewer people. Why is that good for your brand? 

Chris: It depends. It is also, in days of VR on television, you could target a little bit. If you ran your ad on the Golden Girls, you would get more seniors and you get whatever. If you ran it on MTV, you could get young kids and whatever. So there was a degree of targeting, but it was still large groups, I guess to your point. And then this whole idea of, you can target people whose furnace broke today, or this very specific person, that’s where it’s getting out of hand, which is why are you getting narrower and narrower assuming that is the only person who’s going to buy your product.

And the number of people who are in your potential scope is actually much broader than you think in a lot of cases. Considering we talk about building a long-term brand, it becomes the household name, which takes a number of years. And within that number of years, maybe your target floats into that thing. So if you’ve spent that entire time talking to a very narrow group, then when other people float into that narrow group, you haven’t been talking to them all the way along.

Ryan: And when I think about targeting in the sense of, I don’t want to spend as much money, is what the business owner is thinking, and that’s a completely reasonable thing to think about.

As a business owner, I only have X amount of dollars, I need to make them as potent and concentrated as possible on the people that count. But that’s when you’re talking about table stakes, right? When you’re talking about table stakes and you don’t stand out in the market, and you don’t do anything distinctive, and you don’t really matter to anyone, or God forbid, you don’t even advertise at all and you’re just meeting them for the first time at Casino “Goo-gal”. You’re absolutely going to need to target as best you can through keywords, through demographics, through whatever. Just so that you have the ability to spend as little amount of money as possible. But who are you leaving out when you do that? It’s monstrous. It truly is.

Mick: I think, most of the trend towards targeting comes from fear. I think it’s fear of the wrong people. Spending my hard-earned money and reaching a person, who is not in a position to purchase my product and service. And that fear of what the advertising industry calls “wastage” is you’ve reached a person who’s not going to buy it. That fear has now caused us to reject huge amounts of demographics because we want to be so specific because this person buys, and this person buys, so I want to make sure that every single dollar I spend is a person who might potentially buy. But what they’ve forgotten is that the fear of wastage is going to turn this into a ridiculously expensive thing to do if you’re only talking to a very narrow group of people.

Chris: And also I think, you’ve got to remember how fluid targets are, and I’ve got a couple of examples. If you sell boats, yeah, wouldn’t it be great if you could just target that guy in March, when he’s finally decided, you know what, this summer I need to have a boat, so let me start looking around for boat stores, I’m going to go out this March. And that seems boy, if you could just target people who have decided this spring is the spring, man, they’ve been thinking about it, but this spring is the spring.

The fact is, if you’ve been marketing to people who are thinking about buying a boat, they’ve been fishing for years, they’ve been water skiing for years, they’ve had a cottage for years, whatever it is, they’ve been thinking about it for years.

This may be the spring that they actually go and do it, but if you’ve been advertising to them for years when supposedly they’re not the target yet, they now have a brand of preference that’s already in their heads. If you try to get them at the last moment while someone else has been advertising to them for years, then you’re going to be playing catch up with that. The other interesting thing is, I would like to quote David Foot who wrote Boom Bust & Echo, talking about how demographics change and how targets change.

What’s interesting, I think, about what he said, is the aspects of target audiences that actually stay the same. He pointed out that, hey, when the Boomers, boy, when they all graduated from college, they all went out and bought small little cars. Honda Civics are selling like crazy. It’s like, guess what? Everybody just graduated college, just looking for a cheap little runabout that they could do.

And then when they have kids, and they have a house, and whatever, they buy a bigger car, they buy a nicer car, because they get more senior. Those things about those demographics have always been there. And if everyone knows about them, then the 12-year-old who knows about Honda Civics, when he gets to be that age, is going to go and buy that car.

So establishing your brand, again, if you’re playing the long game, if you’re being the household name, if you’re being the brand that people have in mind before the triggering event that makes you want to go and do it, that wastage is not wastage.

Ryan: I think it’s really important to put a finer point on this, in so much as we’re not saying go and run radio ad campaigns when you don’t service the whole city, for example, as a home service company. We’re not saying, talk to everyone and disappoint the majority of people that you don’t service, that’s a bad marketing strategy and well wasted. But we are saying, talk to as many people as you can get to and consistently talk to at a regular pace. That might mean that you’re targeting your area, but we’re not targeting 35-year-old women in your area who are homeowners and like the color red and have a dog.

At the end of the day, we have to understand that everyone in our target area, right or wrong person, i.e. a renter, a homeowner, a person who is going to buy her thing now or later, or not, those are all people, as influencers. And we see everyone as an influencer. If you’re 18 years or older, we can start working that line for you, that messaging for you so that you start getting embedded in the long game, as you said, Chris, to have them thinking about you well before they ever need your thing. And having that know, like, and trust, impression already imprinted on them for when they actually need your thing. So that’s a hugely important thing.

Defining things and agreeing to a set of terms is probably one of the most challenging things that we have in communication. It’s the thing that gets in our way of just agreeing what targeting is, and then how do we target appropriately for strategy, but how do we target appropriately or stop targeting appropriately to reach the masses?

Now, that being said, the best ads are about a customer and their life. The worst ads are about your business and the table stakes that you bring to the table, that are minimum standards today. One of the things that Roy has always said to us is that you’re never going to go bankrupt talking to the wrong people with the right message. So what is it that we have to do, or what do we do that stands us 600 feet above the competition without actually obsessing about the ultra targeting that we’re talking about?

Mick: I think you brought up a really interesting point. I’ve never thought of it this way until you just said it now. I think it has to do with your mindset as a business owner and your mindset as a marketer of the short-term versus long-term philosophy that you have.

If you’re targeting, if you’re narrowcasting, you started talking to a smaller group of people by definition, that is a short-term thought. As soon as you go from short-term thinking to long-term thinking, you start adding more people to your demographic target.

I remember I had a client, this was years ago, a chain of tire retailers. I had written them a jingle, and they had a tagline, get in the car for tire, I decided to walk around the community where this campaign existed. And I got people to say their tagline. I got all sorts of people in town, including a group of high school students, who sang the whole song. And I played this back to the client and said, “Isn’t this cool? And here’s this group of five teenage girls who just sang your song, isn’t that brilliant?”

And the business owner was like, “16-year-old girls don’t buy tires. Why are you so proud of yourself that this group of the wrong people is so excited about this?”

And I said, “I’m no expert on teenage girls, but one thing I do know is that they grow up. And eventually, they start driving. And eventually, they buy their own car. And when they buy their own car, they are now responsible for purchasing new tires. These people have a preferred brand at 16, holy crap. Where do you think they’re going to be buying their tires in 10 years?”

And he said, “10 years, f*** off.”

Are you in this for the long game, that’s my point. That’s the long game. If you’re thinking of long-game, by definition, more people fall into your trap. And if you’re getting bogged down in targeting, I’m saying to you, “Why are you only worried about today?”

Ryan: When we think about the bell curve of standard deviations, there’s 7% of the market that’s at any given time in any given trade area, looking for a thing today. Of that 7%, there’s a substantial percentage, somewhere between 40% and 60% depending on the market, depending on industry, that has already got a decided provider.

They’ve got a guy, right? Then there’s 16% of that population that couldn’t finance a hot dog, so there’s no way they’re getting anything that you have to sell. It doesn’t matter how much they like it. Then there’s the ultra-invested-in-you and they’re going to buy from you regardless.

And then there’s the fundamentally, the undecided, which leaves us with what, 1-3% at best of that 7%, that could possibly buy from you. And then, if the very first place you meet them is Google at the roulette table, all you’re doing is hoping that they pick you from this one of many things, that ball drops onto your 39, you get the payout. And you had to pay for that payout, by the way.

At the end of the day, what do we actually have here? This is a literal hope strategy, in its purest sense. But at the end of the day, what are we trying to actually achieve here?

What are we actually trying to get done with the strategy that we put in place, regardless of if it’s targeting; we’re going to have less people, we’re going to have less chances. You’re putting your number on less numbers on the roulette table. And you have less of a chance of winning.

Chris: Broadening your target is the only way you can actually grow that market. There’s a thing that you said, I only want to talk to the people who are currently in my “target”. Then you’re all trying to divide up that small piece of the pie. How do you make that piece of the pie bigger so that you can, A, you’re going to have a bigger percentage of it, but then B, it’s a bigger piece of pie? You do that by perhaps appealing to more people than you thought were in your target market originally.

I always talk about a story when I was a kid. I used to belong to the Columbia Record and Tape Club, right? Back in the day, you used to join them for a penny, you’d get seven CDs and they’d send them to you, and then you had to buy a few more. At the time being.

Ryan: Will you owe Columbia?

Chris: Well, they were probably still looking for me. My name was Dave Smith.

So the interesting thing that would happen is the way it worked is they would send you the monthly selection and if you didn’t want it, you had to send it back. And so if you forgot to fill out the card and send it back, then you were stuck with something. That’s how I got to know some of my favorite artists today, is that I didn’t want the monthly suggestion but I forgot to say no and so I ended up with a stupid thing.

And so I was not in the target market of that band until somebody sent me their record and I played it because I got stuck with it and it turns out I love these guys. The advantage of targeting people who are not currently in your target audience is that’s how you get more people in your target audience.

That’s how people find out about it. You know what, “I’ve heard about this such and such product. Apparently, if you do this, meh, I should look into that.” You went from not being in the target to being in the target. And the only way to do that is to appeal to a broader range than just those people.

Ryan: Interesting that you say that, though. Fun fact, science has proven, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that an 18-year-old person will be exactly 28 years old in 10 years.  Primed for the buying of grown-up shit.

Mick: But on the topic of targeting the person who’s ready to buy today. And that’s when business owners get excited. There’s a person who’s ready to buy today. Don’t you want to talk to that person? You bet.

In a sense, targeting the person who’s ready to buy today was the entire strategy of the Yellow Pages.

The only thing that they were good at was if someone was ready to pick up a phone book. There’s a thing called the “phone book”.

We’re going to pick up a phone book and make a call to someone who’s ready to buy it today. And they’ve built an empire on that entire idea. As we’ve discussed before, that only applied, they would sell that by saying, the idea is, that these are all the consumers who are ready to buy. We’re going to put them in the Yellow Pages and they’re going to see your ad and if you buy the biggest ad, you’re going to have a better chance of doing it.

What they didn’t mention is that there are huge, entirely massive amounts of categories where people will not do that and that shit still applies today. If we wanted to go and get a fast-food burger right now, what would we do? Would we go to Google and say “burgers near me?”

We would go to freakin Mickey D’s,  like everybody else. And if you go to the Yellow Pages, there was never a big ad for them. And if you go to Google and say “burgers near me,” McDonald’s won’t show up. Those people are making a lot of burgers today and making a lot of dough doing it.

The goal is to be like McDonald’s, have people already have your business in their head so that they’re not Googling “burgers near me,” they’re saying, where’s the nearest Ryan’s Burgers? That’s what I want.

Chris: And that’s it, that brings up an interesting topic as well, which is people are different targets at different times.

I love a craft hamburger, made by a one-of-chef style guy, as much as the next guy. I also like the Big Mac. And I also like the Wendy’s burger. And I also like the Whopper. And I’m in a different mood at different times.

By all means, if you’re the handmade chef burger, then, by all means, promote that in your advertising. And then the day I’m feeling like that kind of burger, I will totally think of you first.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not also in the other demographic and will respond to their target. So, in terms of making sure that the message is heard by all people, be heard by all people, and you’ll get me on the day that I slot into one of those categories.

Ryan: Now, as the cost of whatever it is that you sell raises up, and the longer the purchase cycle gets, the greater the distance of those neurotransmitters are going to die off like Texas Grass if we’re not reminding them that you’re still the most relevant choice at that time. As the price tag goes up, the propensity towards transactional becomes much, much higher. Nobody wants to take their buddies out to the backyard to show them the new air conditioning condenser that’s there.

Mick: Lovely, though.

Ryan: See how quiet that is, boys? That thing is just humming baby, you can’t even hear that from inside, my God, that’s good.

Chris: Is that a J-2000? The J-2000 is a good model.

Ryan: Now, that might be slightly different from the marriage-saver 6000, the G400 toilet. We can get into that conversation another time. Spectacular toilet, it does save lives and marriages… a whole other conversation, we’ll introduce that with some of our clients.

That being said, we have this opportunity to recognize that we need to be top of mind during the trigger moment. And the only way that we’re going to be able to do that effectively is to repeatedly be in front of them with something that is going to resemble entertainment. Because until such time, they’re not going to remember facts and figures about your business. They’re not going to care that you’ve been open for 75 years. The people who opened that business are all dead. No one cares. It doesn’t show an establishment of trustworthiness and durability that we think it does.

What sticks with a person’s mind is the bright pink elephant that we’re using, the kangaroo that we put in the commercial, the thing that makes them giggle and laugh a little bit so that there’s a positive resonance in that chemical memory that mortar to the bricks, so that there is that chemistry that’s anchoring them in to build our brain bigger than their brain.

Chris: Then I think you have to think of wastage in terms of that longevity, which is, if you’re Porsche, you are going to, “Waste your marketing for 35 years on a guy.”

When he’s 16 and he sees your ad and loves the car. When he’s 18 and he puts it up in his dorm room with a poster of the car he’s going to own one day, in his 20s, in his 30s. You can call that wastage. It’s not. It’s an investment. Because when that guy makes Senior Partner and he gets a little bonus and it’s like, you know what, “I’m finally going to buy that car and treat myself.”

And then it’s going to come in. And that was not wastage for 30 years. That was an investment for 30 years. That was that longevity, which paid off in the end.

Ryan: And I think that there’s an astoundingly important statement buried in there that we need to tease out.

Chris: I normally bury my best ideas. Somebody else has got to pick them out.

Ryan: You’re absolutely right. We’re talking about the word, and the word that you said that rang true from me, was investment.

Look, branding and Binet and Fields talks about this constantly. Branding is a compounding effect. It builds in the brain over time, particularly the chemical brain, when we give it the proper repetition and salience, relevance, right?

Ultimately, when we build that thing up, that’s investment in your brand; that’s what’s making you the household name. Table stake stuff, goes invisible. Sales offers, goes invisible. Lead gen costs, like the cost-per-clicks, the cost per impressions, the costs that you’re into media that disappears from the client’s radar in seven-seconds, seven days, or the short-term because they don’t need your thing, those are sunk costs. That’s where money is lost in marketing.

If we can reduce the total volume of that and get that price down as a whole, the return on advertising spend as a whole is down, in the sunk cost category, and bring it up in the compounding cost, the compounding investment that you’re making in your business.

Think of it like a stock. You put $50,000 into stocks in year-one, you didn’t make more than $50,000, you just invested in them. But that 50,000 then earns you 55,000. And that 55,000 earns you 70,000. And that 70,000 earns you 100,000, and it goes on and on, and that’s the power of compounding that we’re applying to communication. We can’t let the communication die off.

If we do, we’re going to lose the salience, the long-term, that building that we built up, that McMansion is gonna slowly just start to disappear, crumble down because there’s been nothing to prop it up. Now that being said, some of those things linger when the advertising is highly impactful.

Mick: But the impact, and the importance of salience, I think, cannot be overstated. You can target with media. And generally, when we talk about targeting, we’re almost always talking about targeting via media. But you can also target with a message. And the best example of that is when your message is a price or an offer.

What you were doing there, certain people will say, what you’re doing is, you’re appealing to the people who are ready to buy today. The only ones who matter, right? The people who buy today. Okay, that’s great. But realize that when you put a price into a message, what you’re telling everybody who is not in the market today, which is the vast majority, do not listen to this message because there’s nothing of value for you.

And that’s why Porsche doesn’t put the price of their ads, of their cars, in the magazine ads, because we’re trying to get you to like the car, we’re not trying to sell you the car today.The dealer will do that. But it’s important to remember that if your message is constantly offers, constantly numbers, constantly prices, yes technically, you’re talking to the 1/10th of 1% of people who today are ready to buy a car or today ready to buy a furnace.

But what you’re doing is if 100,000 people were watching this TV program, as soon as you put that thing in, now you’ve stopped talking to a hundred thousand people and you’re only talking to 30. Holy crap. It costs the same amount of money to talk to 100,000 people today and give them something worth remembering than it does to talk to 30.

Holy shit, what are you doing talking to 30 people when you have an opportunity to talk to 100,000,000 people for the same amount of money?

Which is why we try to focus on how can we make a message that’s relevant to all 100,000, including the 30. So that when everybody else comes to the point where they want to buy the product or service that we offer, we’re already there. They’re not Googling it. Or they’re Googling our brand, not the category. That’s how you take the same amount of money and have it work hard for you. This is the essence of what Ryan talks about when he says, ‍

“I can take the amount of money you’re spending now, and give you four times the results without increasing it.”

It’s this. This is what we’re talking about.

Ryan: This is exactly what we’re talking about. And it’s reshuffling what we already have. We don’t need to spend more budget, we need to spend the budget better and get more results from it. We need to pull more from it. Now, we’re blessed to do that in a number of different ways because of the size and scale of our organization.

But beyond that, targeting is this double-edged sword. It’s completely understandable that these business owners want to have control of their budget, and I totally feel for business owners who are trying to do their best damn job to be fiduciarily.

What we’re looking at is, we have so much budget to spend, where do we spend it the wisest? Is targeting always going to be the solution? Maybe geographically, but not hyper-specific to the clients.

The better targeting is going to happen in the words that we use to speak to the relational customer that we’re looking to attract the good customer as it were, right? And to condition those transactional customers that there’s more to think about than just the price. There’s also the energy, there’s also the time that’s invested to make sure that they get the best possible solution, not just the cheapest possible solution.

Mick: And know that if the basis of your marketing right now is offers and prices, know that you are talking to a minuscule amount of people in your market, and you can be beaten by somebody who talks to everybody for the same amount of money.

Ryan: There’s always somebody who’s got more money and they’re willing to outspend in a lot of these categories that we worked in.

Speak a distinctive value, say something that’s going to stand 600 feet above the competition. How do you do that?

It’s not by doing a hundred things better than everyone else. It’s about doing one or two, maybe three things significantly better than the average. And things that most competition would look at and go, “Oh, they’re bonkers. I’d never do that. That’s nuts. I can’t believe they’re doing that.”

Or they’ll try to do it for three months and go, “That didn’t work,” because they didn’t try it the right way. They didn’t have the mix right.

Targeting based off of the impact of the message with obnoxious repetition is really one of those key things. And it has to bake into all of those digital present spots, all of those phone present spots, all of those spots where the customer goes looking when they actually need your thing. The two have to strike a balance. But the balances are usually disproportionately the opposite way with most of the clients that we come in and adjust for. And that makes a huge difference to the ultimate result and the ultimate profitable growth that goes along with it.

Look, big brands are in it for the long play, right? That’s what I see and hear out of this conversation. Even if they’re selling their business in three years, it’s better to be playing the long play than the short play. If you want to be a market leader, you really need to do this to become the household name, not just another name that they recognize.

Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

Do you have questions or topics you want us to cover? Email us at advertisinginamerica@wizardofads.com

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Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and your audience captivated.

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