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Just as important as what you say is whom you say it to.

Direct mail marketers have always known that their success depends as much on list to which they mail as on their offer and creative. Lists with identical demographic and geographic selects and equivalent non-deliverable percentages can generate response rates that vary by 300% or more.

Obviously target audience selection is just as important in traditional mass and digital media.

Consider the Super Bowl as a case in point. At the 2008 event (before the wheels came off the economy), the cost of reaching 97.5 million viewers was $2.7 million, a CPM of $27.69. A bit high, but not off the chart. Especially when you consider that commercials in the Super Bowl are virtually TiVo proof.

But... that's $27.69 for every man, woman and child in the audience. Budweiser bought seven of those $2.7 million spots (hopefully a volume discount reduced the $18.9 million list price a bit) to reach male beer drinkers. The CPM versus males –all males – was $46.15. Which is getting pricy. And not all males are beer drinkers. And not all beer drinkers drink a lot of beer. The true CPM(t) – that is, cost per thousand members of their target audience – was probably on the order of $400 for each one of Bud's seven spots.

Who's their true target audience? Heavy beer drinkers. Back in the 1960s the marketers at Schaeffer Beer, a Northeast regional brand, and their agency, BBDO, figured out that the 80/20 rule worked big time in the beer market. Heavy beer drinkers – those who drink six or more 12-oz. beers a day – accounted for more than 80% of total beer sales. BBDO's Jim Jordan created the first beer campaign focused on consumers' need states with the classic "Schaeffer is the one beer to have when you're having more than one." The two-beat structure and a simple jingle made the positioning unforgettable – and highly successful – for years.

Later, Miller went Schaeffer one better with their classic Miller Time campaign. McCann-Erickson strategist, Van vanBortel, did some research to determine exactly who the heavy beer drinkers were.

His answer: the reparative personality type. The group was defined as blue-collar males, aged 35+, in first-level management jobs. A steel-mill foreman, for example. But vanBortel went a crucial step farther, with insight into the psychographics of the reparative personality group. These men felt that their work kept the economy moving, supported their families and was underappreciated. Their daily half-dozen or more beers were their self-bestowed recognition and reward for their otherwise unrecognized contributions.

Van's portrait of the heavy beer drinker was the raw material from which Bill Backer and Billy Davis crafted the great Miller Time campaign. It's been a while, so here's a reminder of the kind of copy used to open the spots: "Today you poured enough steel to build a bridge across the Mississippi. But the five o'clock whistle just blew, and now it's Miller Time."

The campaign talked to the target audience in their terms and about their feelings. And it was a phenomenal success. In fact, it was so much of a success that it was copied by Budweiser's "For all you do, this Bud's for you."

There are many examples of target audience selection impacting marketing success. A few we've taken part in include:

• Forms automation software developer CLR Sprinter had been targeting IT departments. After all, they were selling software. But a BrainPosse principal realized that their software offered no perceptible advantage to the IT group, but had significant sales and operational benefits. Switching the target audience to top management and marketing management increased qualified leads by a factor of nine, and reduced the sales cycle from a year to three months.
  
• Employer group health insurer Cariten had been running a television campaign target to the general public when a BrainPosse principal was asked to develop a new strategy and creative. It became apparent that while an organization's employees were the ones covered by health insurance, they had virtually no say in the choice of insurance provider selected for coverage. Redefining the target audience as top management, financial executives and human resources department personnel helped multiply Cariten's sales, and took them from a $14.7 million loss to a $10.6 profit.
  
• The Fort Worth Convention and Visitors Bureau targeted its campaign to individual travelers within a day's drive of the city. A BrainPosse principal realized that the available budget would not be able to reach and attract a significant number of individual visitors, and re-focused the effort on package tour operators and convention and meeting planners. In the first year of the new campaign more than 300,000 additional room nights were booked.
  
• Most hospitals get a substantial percentage of their admissions through emergency department visits. However, a disproportionate number of emergency department patients are uninsured. A BrainPosse client hospital is about to experiment with a direct mail effort targeted to ZIP+4 carrier routes which have demographics consistent with high levels of private insurance and Medicare coverage, to attract paying emergency room patients without attracting increased numbers of non-paying patients. In many markets, addressable cable is another practical alternative to reach demographically/geographically targeted audiences.

The targeting capabilities of the internet offer tremendous opportunities to marketers. There is still a lot of disagreement about preferred vehicles, metrics and even pricing. But as Lord Leverhume or John Wannamaker (depending on whether you're a Brit or an American) famously said: "I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The problem is, I don't know which half." There's enough potential in the net to make it worth wasting half an internet budget to take advantage of what the other half will bring in.

We happen to believe in search, both organic and paid. Being at or near the top of the list when someone Googles "refrigerators" will, of course, mean paying to reach a very few kids doing a report on the history of refrigeration. But an investment in either search engine optimization or paid search will get a lot more people who are in the market for a new side-by-side.

A lot of industry data seems to indicate that banners and pop-ups get less viewership with each passing day but, on a pay-per-click basis, contextual or behavioral ads obviously deliver a well-targeted audience that has at least seen the advertiser's message. If the product or service lends itself to cost-per-action pricing, it's a no-lose proposition for the advertiser.

As with traditional media, the key to effective targeting online is in well-thought-out audience definition. Who are the key purchase decision makers for the bulk of sales in the product category? How many of them do you need to reach? And in what environment will you find them most receptive to your message?

Target audience selection alone won't do the job, of course. But without good target audience selection even the most insightful strategy and the most effectively communicating creative won't deliver bottom-line results.

Want to re-examine who you need to reach and how you need to reach them? Contact us by clicking here or by calling (865) 330-0033.