With technology developing at a faster pace and media expanding onto more platforms, the audience of specific media titles continues to become increasingly diverse. This is even more relevant within the newspaper world with the readers of print publications being potentially very different to the person reading the same title on a tablet.
This expansion of space means that now – as well as picking the right platform – we at MEC must consider the question of what is the right section or device within these platforms to place advertising. The Guardian has attempted to address this issue with a new initiative called ‘audiences not platform’, which gives agencies the chance to take their audience and then match it to certain platforms. For example, if we want to target ABC1 women we can now use our usual planning tools, directly build this audience and work out which aspect of The Guardian is right for our title. In the case of ABC1 women, this might mean it’s better to place three insertions in The Guardian Saturday edition, or suggest 300,000 impressions on Life on Style on The Guardian website might be better suited to our needs.
While it may seem like a simplistic example of how this would work, there are two interesting things we can take from this. Firstly, it gives us the ability to make sure any activity undertaken in The Guardian is in the right place for our audience. Secondly, this initiative also gives agencies direct access to The Guardians planning data tool, doing this gives a new level of transparency to who actually is consuming certain areas of The Guardian’s plethora of content and enables us here at MEC to actually buy our audience not just the specific Guardian platform. It will be particularly interesting to see how this way of working develops with other newspaper titles and how in the future we can match our audience not just to a title but to how they consume that title.
However, whilst this way of planning is thought-provoking, the platform cannot be completely forgotten and one always needs to consider how relevant content is to an advert, for example whilst you may reach more 45+ men on the sports pages when selling a gardening product it may actually be better reaching less 45+ men in The Guardian section who are actually engaged in this content and therefore the products around them.
This move from The Guardian is particularly interesting as it addresses the fact that new technology is making standard media titles audience much more diverse.it will be interesting to see how the different ways we consume media affects the identity of specific brands and who their audience actually is.