The idea of Persuade-able Audiences has been intriguing for many decades. Originally the best work in this sub-field was done by companies that targeted people who were identified as Convertible (term coined by Jannie Hofmeyr) meaning that they showed evidence of not being entirely sold on the brand they were currently buying in a particular product category. In the early 00s this idea morphed by the work done at TRA (now TiVo Research) into targeting Heavy Swing Purchasers, heavy category buyers who bought your brand occasionally in the past. These approaches continue to pay off in increased ROI.

However, it has nothing to do with the ad. Sending an ad to specific people based on the psychological alignment between that specific ad and the people you send it to is a different idea. Therefore, both ideas can be used together.

Because the creative is the largest single influencer of sales outcomes, ad-specific persuadables represent a higher power effect as compared to persuadables defined solely based on their past buying behavior.

This is demonstrated by the first article in the right-hand column, which uses the highest validity measurement method, random control trial, to measure the sales effects of ad-specific persuadables vs. the targets that had been used successfully before by a major retail chain in programmatic digital.

The second article in that column provides more detail on how RMT and Semasio actually determine which of the 300 million Americans show the greatest degree of alignment in motivations and values to your specific ad. RMT and Semasio are now also in Canada and coming soon to over 20 other major global markets where Semasio is already operating.

The third article is an excerpt of a report by the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) which points out rather large gaps in the validity of lookalike modelling used in targeting over 90% of the over $60 billion invested each year in programmatic digital advertising.

The fourth article reports a study done in conjunction with the ARF of how well product-specific benefits perform vs. life motivations as targeting mechanisms. The study finds that they both perform well, doubling the engagement rate, and when used together they quintuple the engagement rate.

The fifth article relates to tune-in advertising – advertising a television series or Special program. This is a ripe field for targeting people whose content consumption reveals that their values and motivations are highly aligned with your TV series, especially the scenes you excerpted for the specific tune-in ad. There are two reasons to believe that the targeting by ad content method can work best in tune-in:

1. RMT’s 265 values/motivations most granular variables were distilled from 1562 candidates by studying the effects of a TV program recommender based on set top box data. A TV program recommender is really a form of “requested tune-in”. Being derived in this way, from a form of tune-in, is one reason to believe that the ad-based targeting method will work especially well in regular tune-in or any other form of tune-in.

Simmons found that the adoption of media brands (TV series specifically) was explained to a much greater degree by the RMT 265 variables (“Value Signals”) than the adoption of other kinds of brands: