A is for...Audience

Part I | Pen Portraits, Personas & Attitudinal Audiences

When building out an A to Z of something, there was always going to be an oversupply of options that might sit under A, not so much Z.

With regards to media planning, I could have gone all futuristic and muse artificially intelligent, algorithmically automated media plans and planning processes that advertisers across the globe currently claim they benefit from.

I could have gone back to the future and talk about audio, as 2019 was the year of audio, or at least the year of podcasting, which might come in a few weeks under P anyhows.

I could have dived into the murky world of ad-tech, affiliates, audit-led planning or auditing at large.

ASBOF was a great shout by my good mate Tom Darlington at the pub the other day.

However, it would be remiss not to start with the most commonly used word across media agencies and across disciplines within those agencies.

It’s not alcohol. Not in January anyway.

A is for Audience.

A term that is commonly used but understood and applied in different ways depending on who you might be talking to, about what, at which point in the campaign planning process.

Unless there is a common understanding of which audience is under consideration for which reasons at different points in the planning, the activation and the measurement of advertising and communications, you can quickly go off-piste and take a x-agency and client team off-strategy in the process.

With that in mind I’m going to try and give a view of how clients, creative agencies, tech companies, media planners and buyers I’ve worked with throughout my time in the industry define, refine and use audiences that might be helpful to have in mind when planning your next campaign.

So, if you’re still with me we’ll do just that. Across 3 parts.

Part I | Pen Portraits, Personas & Attitudinal Audiences
Part II | Category Buyers | Out-of-Market vs. In-Market Audiences
Part III | Media Buying / Trading Audiences

Part I | Pen Portraits, Personas & Attitudinal Audiences
I’ll start with the trusty pen portrait, otherwise referenced as a “creative” audience or a “brand” audience or a “persona” for those that like to dress things up with more impressive language.

I’ve provided a few illustrative examples on the graphic below

Whilst Patsy, from Stoke Newington, who wears a pair of beaten up Veja’s over a discrete tattoo she had done on her gap year… or Mike, from the outskirts of Cambridge, that gets paid in cash and lives for the weekend…may not appear that useful for a media planner, the reason is they’re not designed strictly with us in mind.

Pen portraits or Personas of artificially generated individuals, such as Patsy or Mike, or collectives such as Pleasure Seekers, Tribal Drinkers or the Progressive Premium describe what I’ve come around to labelling as “Attitudinal Audiences” a brand might want to recruit and retain for the long haul.

They’re important for a media planner to understand, but they aren’t audiences we should take literally into the planning, the buying and the measurement of a media plan.

The reason being if you design your media plan and deliver it exclusively to the bullseye view of the attitudinal examples I shared earlier, your media plan will likely end up missing a large chunk of category buyers; resulting in your brand being less likely to come to mind in buying situations and thus reduce its rate of sale or growth potential.

Take this data from Kantar/TGI around who buys a pretty popular brand of canned soups, beans and bottled sauces vs. who buys the category in the UK.

If we were to bias our plans to only reach young families who might be the “Attitudinal Audience” using under-40s as a notional cut-off, you’d be disregarding over 3/4 of the category buying base.

This wasn’t an issue when most media bought out of agencies, was broadcast media.

However, this becomes a real issue as we accelerate towards a programmatic landscape that gives you the option to target everyone, or an audience of one, with increasing levels of accuracy.

Hence Attitudinal Audiences like the ones referred to above, in my opinion, should be used as reference points and filters for brand managers and those they work alongside creating the positioning of the brand in people’s minds, how a brand behaves and is experienced throughout people’s lives, and the subsequent advertising that might follow.

They’re there to inform the creative teams that create the advertising, to act as a springboard and more importantly a filter for any creativity in media or contexts a media planner might suggest appearing within and alongside that might manifest later in the planning process - to make a campaign pop harder.

By all means design a plan with the attitude in-mind, but always aim to deliver to the collective category buying base where resources allow.

Whilst the media planner is less likely to own the pen portrait or the attitudinal audience, in Part II I will walk through the audience that I see as being the one the media planner should really be the expert in the room. In which I’ll break down how I go about pulling apart who buys from a category, how they go about doing so and the steps you might go through to better understand why.

Until next time…