Combining targeting with the social aspects of the web could be just what brand marketers need to improve their efficiency in reaching the right audience. Writing for iMediaConnection, Josh Dreller, VP of media technology and analytics at Fuor Digital, explained, “the inevitable marriage of the social web and targeting has resulted in what’s become known as social targeting. Offered by various vendors, social targeting technology tracks a specific group of users (for example, your core audience) and then attempts to identify the online connections of these users (i.e., your friends and family). Once these connections are uncovered, media can be targeted to them via the same anonymous pixel technology that is currently being used to target online display.”
He continued, “The thought process here is not hard to follow — if you buy U2 tickets, there’s a high chance that your friends might want to buy them too — at least a better chance than anyone else off the street. It’s this basic principle that has the industry buzzing about social targeting and the vendors trumpeting case studies showing performance lifts many times that of standard targeting methodologies. If you’re a brand out there with lots of seemingly unmonetizeable social media fans, you might want to test to see if social targeting is for you.”
Word of mouth and social networking has become increasingly important in the video games space, so game marketers may want to keep this in mind.
