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The Two Challenges of Targeted Messaging

by Mike Trapanese

I started getting solicitations for credit cards when I was in middle school. "Look Ma, I'm pre-approved!" These mailings were my earliest exposure to the impersonal face of marketing. Today, not a day goes by that my spam filter doesn't pick up an offer for Viagra, diet pills, or male enhancement products.

Marketers have always faced a trade-off between delivering their messages to the broadest possible audience and making that message personal. Consider marketing's historical tangent away from personal interaction:

• 1744: Ben Franklin sells scientific books through the first mail order catalogue
• 1941: Bulova Watch Co. airs the first TV commercial before a Brooklyn Dodgers game
• 1994: AT&T posts the first internet banner ad on HotWired

Even today, Billboards, telemarketers, and email blasts struggle to make their messages effective. Delivering a targeted message really poses two challenges:

1. Ensuring that a message reaches the appropriate audience (read: no credit card offers to 12-year-olds)
2. Making that message personal

More sophisticated segmentation tools continue to help marketers hit the most appropriate targets, with Nielson Media Research leading the charge on the air waves and Google Advertising taking care of business online. In this way, firms are starting to meet the first challenge of targeted messaging. Making this message personal, however, continues to be an elusive challenge across all industries.

With television, companies have found that testimonials can be successful at putting a human face to an otherwise generic message. On the internet, ideas like this are still gaining traction. Asset.tv is helping asset managers by working with them to shoot, produce, and post videos to PSN (Plan Sponsor Network) profiles. Although not without limitations, video is one way to address the second challenge of targeted messaging.

Today's technology allows firms to reach the broadest applicable audiences-- vendors like Asset.tv can take them one step closer to making that message personal. Maybe one day the Mexican diet pills industry will take a hint from investment companies.