Media spend is typically the largest cost item in an A&P budget.

And in our experience, as ad agencies and clients have allocated a larger slice of their budget to ‘digital channels’, there is unfortunately a major side-effect: wastage.

Not wastage due to bots, or overbidding for search terms. But wastage due to poorly targeted media that ignores rich current customer profiles.

Next & Co has launched a proprietary media auditing tool called Prometheus. Identifying that almost 40% of digital advertising is wasted.

So what’s going wrong?

Much has been written about first party customer data (1PD). And how media agencies are starting to request and use 1PD  from their clients for more relevant targeting.

This all sounds fantastic. However, it often ignores the real value of the 1PD being used.

Media agencies typically request customer data in order to exclude current customers from being targeting. Which obviously makes sense from a prospecting and acquisition perspective.

However, opportunities exist to identify prospects that may ‘look like’ the profile of your best customers (called look-a-likes).

This approach goes well beyond basic name and demographic information (age, income, location, gender). Your media agency could utilise customer value attributes for next level targeting and relevance.

This involves digging deeper into your conversion data and customer profiles to unearth actionable insights. Then feeding it back into the media targeting tools and adtech being utilised.

It’s not good enough for media agencies to set and forget platforms such as Google’s DV360 to automatically bid and deploy.

Google DV 360

Key questions to ask your media agency:

  • what targeting tools are they using?
  • what methodology are they actually using for targeting?
  • what 1PD are they utilising?
  • how are the keywords and targeting approaches playing on a functional versus emotional level in the buying process?
  • how is the targeting strategy identifying a prospect’s level of knowledge?
  • how is the targeting strategy taking into consideration a prospect’s stage of readiness?
  • what conversion point are they tracking through to (raw leads, pre-qualified leads, purchase and revenue, or profit?)

Need some assistance to change?

If you’d like to pick our brains on how to help change or evolve, then we’d love to hear from you.

We can help audit your current marketing strategy, and targeting approach. And then identify opportunities to help prevent significant media wastage.

We’ve just completed a project for a business with a A$10M spend.