Inclusive targeting in programmatic advertising

Allan Abraham, Product Analyst I, Data Science, MiQ

Inclusivity creates better advertising

‘Inclusion and Diversity’ is about welcoming and celebrating people from all types of backgrounds, especially marginalised groups. The term encapsulates a variety of traits and protected classes, including age, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality and veteran status. Inclusion is the process of taking active steps to ensure diverse members of a community feel safe and valued. In the context of digital advertising, this means creating content and campaigns that speak to and consider an audience representative of the varied people who interact with the brand.

Inclusion works on the following levels:

• Demographic Diversity: Gender, race, or sexual orientation based.
• Experiential Diversity: Affinities, hobbies, and abilities-based setup.
• Cognitive Diversity: How we approach problems and think about things either through market research, audience insights, or uncovering diverse human truths, culture cues, preferred languages, needs, and values.

As a programmatic media partner, MiQ is always looking for ways to improve campaign performance. By helping brands to connect authentically with their audiences, inclusive ads have been proven to drive higher purchase intent. With this in mind, we wanted to understand how we could activate our clients’ campaigns with inclusivity in mind to drive purchase intent lift and also brand loyalty.

Re-evaluating traditional methods

Demographic targeting allows users to be segmented based on long-time life facts like age, gender and parental status. It means that advertisers have to make assumptions about how audience interests align with demographic traits. For example, assuming that gamers are more likely to be young males and also that young males are more likely to be interested in gaming.

Targeting in this way is questionable for reasons both of performance and inclusion. With performance, demographic targeting can result in swathes of potential audiences being missed. Let’s continue with the example of gaming to illustrate this.

Historically, there has been an assumption that gamers are heavily skewed toward younger, male audiences. However, a case study ran by MiQ in 2021 to understand the gaming composition of the German population gave the following results:

We can interpret the index as how much more likely is a user group to reflect a certain trait when compared to the other group(s).

These results show that the gaming industry, which 7–10 years ago catered primarily to male teenages, has had a dramatic change in its target audience. As such, it’s estimated that 48% of gamers are now women. This means targeting based on demographics causes advertisers to miss out on potential users and waste advertising spend on users who share the most common demographic traits of their target audiences, without sharing the same interests.

This type of targeting is also non-inclusive as it does not consider an audience representative of all of the people who would interact with the brand.

Interested in interests

Affinity targeting is an alternative to demographic targeting that targets users based on their passions, habits and interests. By targeting users based on interests, affinity audiences include users across demographics, making it more inclusive than demographic targeting.

At MiQ, we’ve identified a few ways to implement affinity and intent targeting for our clients:

Custom Combinations — Combining data segments using Boolean logic in an AND, OR, or NOT relationship to create advanced segments out of existing data segments.

Custom Audiences — This is a targeting option that allows advertisers to find their existing audiences among users.

In-Market Audiences — In-market audiences allow advertisers to find users who are researching products or services and actively considering buying something similar to what they offer

Similar Audiences — Similar audiences looks at data on existing remarketing audiences and finds new and qualified consumers who have shared interests with that audience. It’s a powerful — but simple — way to reach a much larger audience and drive clicks and conversions among new prospects.

We offer these solutions because we are tech enabled — our Trading Lab is just one of our proprietary technologies. Lab was built to make it simple to deploy more inclusive and custom targeting strategies across any DSP rather than being limited to the DSP’s own algorithms. Being partner agnostic in this way helps us to reduce bias and run ad campaigns that are more beneficial to the wider community.

To learn more about audience targeting at MiQ, check out our website.

Based in the Bangalore office, Allan is a product analyst in MiQ’s data science team. He enjoys sports — especially football — and is also musically gifted, having recently picked up the guitar.