Ad Waste and Marketing Speak

I recently wrote about the experience of re-entering the “Ad Speak” waters after a full 10 days of going cold turkey.

10 days of abstinence from Ad Speak has helped me to “reconnect” with the average small business owner. You know, the one who speaks DIRECTLY with his/her ad rep. The business owner who has the ability to make a decision regarding advertising without getting a PO or approval from the home office. The business owner who knows that once he/she okays the purchase of advertising space, that he/she will be writing a check whether that advertising is deemed “successful” or not.

The second article I consumed after my Ad Speak fast was 5 Tactics for Finding Your Niche. To Jim Meskauskas credit, he does a GREAT job of trying to pull more than a few heads out of the sand with regards to targeting a niche market.

Again, I am reminded of the contortions one must go through on the journey to convey and convince a faceless mob of the value of common sense. Jim writes:

When using available syndicated third-party research to find the sites that might be most appropriate for your client’s advertising, take a look at composition index rather than the reach the site might have against your target.

The index represents the likelihood of the site consisting of your target audience versus that target audience’s presence on the web as a whole. If a site has only a few percentage points of reach but a unique visitor index of 200, that site is twice as likely to consist of your target audience as the overall web.

In layman’s terms, what Jim is trying to illustrate is this:

The Yahoo portal reaches, in terms of numbers MANY MORE visitors than a magazine web site like, say South Florida Parenting Magazine.  As a matter of fact, the Yahoo portal reaches a LOT MORE women aged 25-54 with children than the South Florida Parenting Magazine web site reaches.  However, when you advertise on the Yahoo portal, you’re PAYING to reach EVERYONE, which is overkill if you only want to reach mothers with children who live in Southern Florida.

See, you’ll pay DEARLY for a position on the Yahoo portal.  So while you may reach 10 times the number of mothers with children living in southern Florida than you might reach with the South Florida Parenting Magazine web site, you’ll be paying for a LOT of impressions …. wasted impressions.

Advertising on the South Florida Parenting web site is an example of tightly targeting a niche market.  By tightly targeting a niche market, you can eliminate a lost of WASTE from your advertising dollars.

Posted by Kathy | Filed Under Ad Speak 101 

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