Serving ads to people outside your intended audience doesn’t sound so bad. It means additional eyeballs seeing your messaging, which might help with brand awareness. It could even lead to a bonus conversion or two if you’re lucky. Right? 

Well, that’s the principle digital advertising has worked on for years. Imprecise, non-transparent methods of data onboarding are used alongside probabilistic matching to serve targeted ads to people who are deemed “likely” to fall within the intended audience. And the ads that land outside that audience? They’re just written off as harmless strays.  

However, for retailers and other consumer brands, reaching the wrong people with targeted advertising can be just as bad as reaching the right people with the wrong message. The consequences range from alienating potential prospects to losing customers and damaging brand reputation. 

To illustrate what I mean, here are three real-world situations brands have told me about: 

Situation one: You deliver an offer the customer can’t use 

I recently spoke with a homeware retailer who’d been dealing with the fallout from an irate call to customer service, followed up with a negative social post. The caller had seen a targeted online ad for a patio set with a time-limited 30% discount. 

They’d then spent a considerable part of their day trying to find out how to purchase the garden furniture, only to discover there wasn’t a store in their state and they lived outside the delivery area. In other words, they’d been offered something they wanted (right message) but weren’t able to buy (wrong person). 

It turned out the retailer was unwittingly advertising outside its marketing footprint due to the probabilistic matching activities of its onboarder. This negative customer experience was a direct result of that approach.        

Situation two: You accidentally reach a customer

One of the pitfalls of probabilistic targeting is accidentally advertising to one of your customers – and annoying them in the process. We all know that feeling when you’ve just bought something at full price and you see it advertised as part of a half-price sale. 

I heard about the following situation from a person at a well-known streaming platform. Feedback revealed that customers, who were paying the full monthly subscription fee, were accidentally receiving targeted digital ads intended for prospects they were hoping to convert into new customers. These ads had a discounted starter rate they simply weren’t eligible for – which was understandably irritating. 

What’s more, people who lived with subscribers were also receiving the new customer ads. This encouraged households to let the initial member’s subscription lapse and take advantage of the cheaper offer through a different account. This way the streaming service was missing out on subscription revenue. Annoyed customers and reduced revenues aren’t the ideal outcome of any ad campaign. 

Situation three: You alienate a potential high-value customer 

Probabilistic targeting often results in people who are seen as similar to your intended audience being included in the campaign. But similarity isn’t always a good thing. Diluting audiences this way, but still serving highly tailored ads, can easily backfire. 

Take the example of a sporting goods retailer that was running a campaign intended to reach pickleball players. It turned out many of the pickleball-specific ads were actually being served to people who play tennis because the similarity was that they played racket sports. 

This doesn’t sound too catastrophic. Anyone who plays sports is potentially a valuable customer for that type of retailer. But by serving ads tailored to pickleball – a sport that has a somewhat thorny relationship with tennis – the retailer may well have dissuaded those potential prospects from ever considering them for tennis-related products.

Nobody wants to see irrelevant advertising, and if retailers want to talk to athletes it’s vital they get the right sport. This particular retailer may forever have positioned itself in the customer’s mind as “that pickleball brand.”    

An alternative to traditional onboarding 

These three examples illustrate some of the potential dangers of diluting audiences. Of course, getting targeted ads in front of the wrong person isn’t the only disadvantage of traditional onboarding. The wasted spend associated with advertising to people who aren’t interested in your product is widely understood. The time taken to onboard data is also a major issue, with long turnaround times meaning most brands only go to market on a weekly basis, which keeps agile, responsive marketing strategies out of reach. 

So retailers and other consumer brands need an alternative that gives them a faster, more efficient way to reach the people they want to talk to. And that’s why our new Direct Connectors solution is well worth testing.    

Direct Connectors allows brands that use Acxiom for identity resolution and enhancement to pass audiences straight to publisher platforms using direct integrations or APIs. It has a variety of benefits: 

• You know who you’re talking to: Because Direct Connectors uses deterministic matching between the Acxiom Addressable Universe of more than 340 million people and the publisher’s authenticated user base, you can reach audiences with greater accuracy. Your audience won’t be watered down with supposedly similar people, and you can be confident in tailoring your messaging because you know who’s going to receive it. 

• You decide who not to talk to: Because you have full control of your audiences, you can suppress specific parts of those groups, either at the individual or household level. This ensures targeted messages are kept away from people you don’t want to see them.  

• You can market with agility: 90% of audiences are available on the publisher platforms within 48 hours. This is considerably quicker than the full week required for traditional onboarding. This means you can be faster to market and can ultimately embrace more dynamic marketing strategies.  

• You maximize efficiency: By only reaching people you are confident will be interested in your products or services you minimize media waste. Direct Connectors tests show that even when CPMs are higher due to smaller, higher-value audiences, CPAs are considerably lower. 

Try out Direct Connectors for yourself 

The best way to find out what Direct Connectors can do for your brand is to give it a try. You don’t need to go all in – you can just reallocate some of your existing budget to see what you can achieve. You can even compare the results with the ones your existing onboarder generates. 

We’ve already established direct connections with a variety of digital publishers, social platforms, and advanced TV providers, from Google and Meta to Comcast and NBCUniversal. And we’re continually expanding those relationships. 

Get in touch with one of our experts to discuss your Direct Connectors test today.