Re-Thinking Audience Targeting

We all know that serving up content to the right audience results in better engagement. Marketers have been doing this since the early days of Google and banner networks. And as social platforms get better at inferring our interests and matching them up with brand content, the consumer experience has the potential to become a lot more relevant -- a win-win for both sides of the marketing equation. After all, relevance means attention means action. 

While this represents a huge leap from simple demographic targeting that has been the staple of marketers since the first magazine rolled off the printing press, I think it’s time we also evolve our perspective to look beyond the audience and see this as an opportunity to target the actual content being served.

This is the insight we tapped into when we came up with an idea for Doritos that leveraged interests to not only reach the right audiences, but serve them the most compelling content. 

We know that emojis have quickly become an everyday part of the internet vernacular. So we got creative by combining emojis in the caption line of Facebook posts with autoplay videos under them. What did we get? Emoji heads with different animated bold bodies. Voila!….the BOLD emoji was born.  

I’m a huge fan of hacking, and I believe that a simple change in perspective can often lead to the best hacks. This example of using the same features and functions available to all brands, but doing so in a novel way is something that I think Facebook would agree is a great example of a creative “hack” of their existing platform. We created three of these to start and will serve them up to surfers, drummers, and shark enthusiasts. Check them out below. You can see how the possibilities are endless. Micro audience targeting? No, micro content targeting, my friends. 

Given that football season is around the corner and everyone knows – well, Facebook knows – I’m a Michigan fan, I’m hoping for a Wolverine emoji showing up in my feed soon.