The Disintegration of Audience in the Age of Programmatic Buying
In the untroubled early days of media buying, before the alphabet soup of ad tech, mar tech, and data companies that dominate our menus today was instead made up simply of broadcast networks and magazine audit bureaus, a linear, albeit brittle, rationale existed. Planners planned to the exact budget set forth by the client. The media plan allocated a million dollars if the client had a million-dollar budget. This set the stage for media buyers to spend to that budget. The logic was ostensibly straightforward: the budget was meticulously crafted based on what was required to achieve a communication delivery goal. This goal, in turn, was designed to fulfill the media objective, which cascaded up to meet the marketing objective, ultimately driving the overarching business objective. That means a particular combined media weight to achieve a Reach and Frequency calculated as necessary to move the needle on the advertiser’s business by ‘X’ had been planned and then purchased to move that needle. This cascade of objectives was the bedrock of media buying, ensuring that every dollar spent served a larger, strategic goal.
The data and metrics for making these determinations could have been more precise, but they were sound for their part. The marketing objective informs the media objective, informing the media plan, which informs the media buy follows a logic from a logical first cause, the business objective. Do you want to capture 20% of the chili market west of the Rockies? Great. Here’s how we figured out the waterfall of dependent quantities to make that happen.
However, with its allure of programmatic buying, the digital age has continued to disrupt this once-well-traveled pathway. The forest path is now so overgrown with thickets of technology and data that we can no longer make our way to the Clearing of real achievement of goals. Today, vast swaths of budgets are unceremoniously dumped into the programmatic washing machine, left to churn, tumble, and agitate until every penny is spent. But what emerges from this automated process? Is it the strategic, audience-targeted media buying of yore, or something that could be more precise?
A significant issue with this modern approach is its foundational reliance on "impressions" rather than "audience." In the days of yore, impressions served as the atomic units of the advertising universe, facilitating the determination of media's relative value. These impressions were always intrinsically linked to an audience, ensuring every ad had a human viewer at its core.
In today's digital ecosystem, a chasm has emerged between impressions and their once-indelible link to the audience. Digital advertising affects closing the loop between advertising events, the data that advertising uses for targeting, and the actions and interactions taken in response to that advertising. The data generated from these interactions puts the advertising at the feet of actions taken and where those actions occur.
Over time, the movement of advertising closer and closer to the actions taken led to targeting methods that prefer the action's location rather than the people advertisers want to take that action. This rift has profound implications. The current overreliance on programmatically delivered targeting, driven by algorithmic selection biases, often prioritizes inventory over the actual humans that need to be reached. While technologically advanced, it's a system that often misses the forest for the trees.
Consider this: what value does an ad hold if human eyes do not see it? In the digital realm, creative content—no matter how groundbreaking or compelling—only holds value if a person sees it. A tag call counted by a machine, even if it meets the basic criteria of a served ad, counts for little if there isn’t a set of human eyeballs confronting it. It's akin to a tree falling in a forest with no one around; does it make a sound, or more aptly, does it make an impact?
In media buying, this shift is evident in prioritizing the sheer volume of impressions over the quality and relevance of those impressions to a human audience. The result? A landscape where ads are served en masse, but their actual impact—on real people—is diluted.
The disintegration of audiences in the age of programmatic buying raises concerns about the connection between the brand and its audience. The overreliance on programmatically delivered targeting can prioritize inventory over the actual humans that need to be reached, sundering the brand being advertised from context and casting both the audience and the brand adrift. Media buyers and planners must prioritize audience over impressions and bridge the gap between the old and the new to create meaningful connections between brands and their audiences.
To navigate this complex landscape, media buyers and planners must return to the foundational principles that once guided their craft. They must prioritize audience over impressions, ensuring that every ad served resonates with its intended viewer. Only by bridging the gap between the old and the new can the industry hope to achieve its true objective: creating meaningful connections between brands and their audiences.
While the digital age offers incomparable opportunities for precision and scale in media buying, it also presents challenges. The disintegration of the audience in the face of programmatic buying is a real concern. To address this, the industry must recalibrate its approach, placing the audience—real, human viewers—at the core of every decision. Remember, impressions don’t buy things; people do. It ultimately doesn’t matter how good the technology is if it’s making itself more successful than the brand.
