Marketing 101

Most people who take marketing in school will tell you that you can not advertise something without having a market for it. This is somewhat true, but in reality, most of us have been so conditioned to want the latest and greatest thing, service, etc, that it is fairly easy to create a market right along with a product. This is especially true when the marketers have our demographic information. Demographic information can include anything and everything about us from the most simple to our deepest darkest desires -or secrets! From our height, weight, age, gender, to our favorite hobbies, medical conditions and vacation homes.  

This information accumulates over time from various resources -credit card statements with what we buy, phone bills, applications to buy cars, houses, etc, and even information that we freely give in marketing surveys or if we opt-in for email correspondence. These lists are sold and can be worth billions of dollars to provide what the industry calls “interest-based advertising”. You see this the most in specific magazines or specific cable channels.

The marketers know that if you are watching a certain channel, say race car driving, that your demographics will tend toward young 16-25, heterosexual, male, working class and therefore the advertisements that will be promoted will be toward that group (beer, muscle cars, fast food).  On the other hand, if you are watching a channel or reading a magazine about gourmet cooking, your demographics are much different, say both genders with a slight edge toward females, 30-45, upper middle class with an interest in fine dining. The advertisements on here would reflect that (wine, luxury brand cars, jewelry).

To learn more about these marketing techniques you should watch a great documentary by Frontline called The Persuaders. Especially insightful were the discussions of key words, such as “dominance” for SUV drivers.

Recently, there has been a lot of scrutiny and questions into whether or not the web marketers should utilize this demographic information that they have on people (the sources of which they rarely discuss but probably include past web pages visited and online purchases that they can then cross reference with existing lists on that person) in order to advertise products to them. They call these types of ads “interest-based ads” and because they are worried that the government may crack down on this tracking and baiting, they have decided to “self-regulate” (to me that is like asking the fox to regulate his behavior around the chickens).

What they have come up with is a new, friendly “i” icon that should denote when an ad you are seeing was put in front of you because of your demographic information. While this is helpful for people to realize really how marketed they are, it doesn’t exactly answer the key question, which is How to Opt-Out? Or How did you get that information in the first place? Of course the ad industry wants to market it as “ad choice” which is a complete oxymoron when they are advertising to you without any say on your part. “Well, I can choose to click on the ad or not”, you might say. And that is true, but regardless, they have caught your attention whether you click the ad or not, and subconsciously it may influence a purchase decision later on and that is what branding is all about.