Much of what marketers call “targeting” is still based on traditional marketing segments: postcode, age, gender. The online ads world is racing towards the identification of “audiences” based on many of these segments, and as such is placing an even greater premium on the concept of “male” and “female”, alongside other geo-demographic data.
That kind of targeting simplicity led to this recent post on LifeHacker:
All you need to do is read the replies to see the general sentiment, which varies between “I did this a while ago to my Facebook… if you are an early 20s woman, the ads are almost all for diet pills” to “just get an ad blocker”.
What seems clear is this:
The variance within gender can be greater than the variance beween genders
What that means is that quite frankly today I might behave like a typical “male”, and tomorrow, when looking at something else, like a “typical” female. That undermines much of gender-based targeting, and supports the premise of the LifeHacker posters: that simplistic gender targeting can be self-defeating.
I’m a big advocate of using ALL possible sources of data to drive targeting, of course, but only in a way that takes into account what is most important for each single targeting event. Otherwise, beyond complying with marketers preconceived segmentation notions, targeting won’t actually deliver returns…
My thoughts about targeting, psychology and data - all things that drive my company, 