At A Glance
Market segmentation divides audiences into groups based on shared characteristics to improve targeting, personalization, and marketing ROI. The four primary methods are demographic, geographic, behavioral, and firmographic segmentation. The strongest strategies combine multiple segmentation methods, and Experian can help marketers build, activate, and measure audience segments at scale.In this article…
Marketing without segmentation is a lot like shouting into a crowded room and hoping the right person hears you. Without a clear way to communicate in a noisy marketing environment, your message gets lost in the mix.
With segmentation, you can identify your target audience, speak to their needs, and deliver the right message at the right moment. Companies that use segmentation are 130% more likely to understand customer motivations, resulting in more effective campaigns and deeper audience relationships.
In this article, we’ll break down four of the most effective customer segmentation methods, when to use each, and how Experian’s audience solutions can help.
What is market segmentation?
Market segmentation is the process of dividing a broad audience into distinct groups that share similar traits, like demographics, location, behavior, or firmographic characteristics. Knowing what makes each group unique, you can deliver more relevant messaging and offers through the right channels, optimize spend, and improve outcomes across the full marketing lifecycle.
The four primary marketing segmentation methods are demographic, geographic, behavioral, and firmographic. Each offers a unique lens into your audience and is best suited for different marketing goals. The most effective strategies often combine multiple segmentation methods to create a more complete view of the customer.
Why should marketers segment their audiences?
Audience segmentation helps marketers reach the right people with the right message at the right time, improving personalization, campaign performance, and marketing ROI at scale. Far from being just a targeting tactic, market segmentation is a strategic input that shapes how brands plan, communicate, activate, and measure across channels.
Here’s why you should invest your time and marketing budget in honing your audience segments.
Maximize your marketing ROI
Nobody wants to waste money talking to the wrong crowd. Using various methods of marketing segmentation, you can focus on those who want to hear from you — and the payoff can be huge. For marketing channels like email, segmentation can drive up to 760% more revenue than non-segmented campaigns. The more targeted your message, the better the return.
Create a unified omnichannel strategy
Segmentation helps ensure that every channel, from email and social media to display, SMS, and direct mail, operates from the same playbook.
Once you define your target audience segments, you also need a trusted identity partner to sync them across platforms and environments. This ensures you can deliver consistent, personalized experiences at every touchpoint and your audience receives the same message in the proper context, regardless of where they engage.
Strengthen customer loyalty
Roughly 75% of consumers are loyal to brands that “get” them. When you strive to understand your customers, they’re more likely to stay. Segmentation enables you to personalize communications based on your target segment’s values, behaviors, or preferences, encouraging repeat business.
Expand into new markets
With segmentation, you can analyze existing customers to identify common traits and use that data to pinpoint similar groups in new regions or markets. For example, if your top customers are middle-class parents in suburban areas, you can target lookalike segments in other cities with tailored messaging.
This makes it easier to expand with confidence, knowing you’re reaching people who are more likely to convert.
Lower customer acquisition costs
Rather than forcing you to cast a wide net, segmentation enables you to focus your budget on high-potential audiences across channels, reduce acquisition costs, and minimize wasted spend on low-intent audiences.
Four market segmentation methods and examples
Each market segmentation method reveals something specific about your audience: who they are, where they live, how they behave, or what type of organization they represent. Understanding these dimensions helps you carry out more relevant campaigns, improve targeting accuracy, and uncover new growth opportunities.
While each method can be powerful on its own, the most effective segmentation strategies combine multiple approaches to create a more complete, actionable view of the customer. For example, you might combine demographic and behavioral data to identify high-income households actively researching a particular product category.
Experian supports all four segmentation methods through Marketing Attributes, Mosaic, syndicated audiences, and custom audience solutions. With interoperable data and activation across the broader marketing ecosystem, you can build audience segments once and put them to work across channels.
| Segmentation method | Insight | Best for | Example |
| Demographic | Who your audience is | Consumer targeting, personalization | High-income households |
| Geographic | Where they are | Local campaigns, regional offers | Southwest homeowners |
| Behavioral | What they do | Retention, loyalty, conversion | Frequent online shoppers |
| Firmographic | What business they represent | ABM, B2B marketing | Mid-market healthcare companies |
Let’s take a closer look at each method and when to use it, with real-world examples of market segmentation to help you apply it.
1. Demographic segmentation
Demographic segmentation groups your audience by age, income, gender, education, occupation, marital status, and household composition. It’s the most widely used market segmentation method because it’s accessible, scalable, and data-rich — often closely tied to consumer needs, preferences, and purchasing behavior.
Demographic data makes it easier to tailor your messaging, offers, and channel strategy from the start. And when you combine demographic segmentation with other methods, such as behavioral or geographic segmentation, you can create an even richer view of your audience.
Experian Marketing Attributes, a consumer data resource containing thousands of demographic, behavioral, financial, and lifestyle attributes, provides one of the industry’s most comprehensive demographic data sets, helping you identify, understand, and reach your most valuable audiences.
When to use demographic segmentation
Use demographic segmentation when your product or service is clearly more relevant to people in a specific life stage, income bracket, or household type.
Among all methods of market segmentation, demographic data is often the easiest starting point. It’s especially effective for industries such as financial services, healthcare, education, retail, and others, where consumer needs change based on demographics.
Demographic segmentation examples
As a real-world example, a health supplement company used Experian data to segment its ambassador program audience into four demographic groups based on lifestyle and household makeup. These included younger singles, value-seeking families, high-income spenders, and older empty nesters.
Applying these insights at registration allowed the brand to deliver personalized, channel-specific communications that boosted acquisition and retention. The approach led to stronger engagement and more meaningful customer connections.
2. Geographic segmentation
Geographic segmentation categorizes people by location, including country, region, state, city, ZIP code, or even climate. It’s a simple yet effective way to tailor your marketing, as location often influences everything from lifestyle and language to shopping habits and product needs.
Geographic segmentation is especially valuable for regional campaigns, local service businesses, and brands with location-specific products or promotions. Whether you’re promoting snow boots in Colorado or sunscreen in California, geographic segmentation helps you stay relevant to the local context.
Mosaic, our consumer lifestyle segmentation framework, groups U.S. households based on shared demographic, behavioral, financial, and geographic characteristics. It enhances geographic targeting by segmenting U.S. consumers at the ZIP+4 level, helping you uncover meaningful differences between neighborhoods and reach audiences more accurately.
When to use geographic segmentation
Geographic segmentation is ideal when your offer or message changes depending on climate, culture, availability, or local regulations. It’s also helpful for planning market expansion or testing the performance of different methods of market segmentation across regions. Geographic segmentation is also valuable for regulated industries, such as utilities, where service territories and regional customer needs vary significantly.
Geographic segmentation examples
One home furnishings retailer partnered with Experian to understand how customer needs varied across store locations. Using a mix of client data and Experian demographics, we segmented stores based on their surrounding customer base, like urban, white-collar shoppers in metro centers versus lower-income households in more remote cities.
These insights enabled the retailer to tailor inventory, marketing strategies, and ad copy for each store type, resulting in more relevant customer experiences.
3. Behavioral segmentation
Behavioral segmentation centers on how people live their lives — their interests, habits, and decision-making patterns. It includes factors like past purchases, brand engagement, engagement frequency, loyalty status, product usage, browsing patterns, and responsiveness to offers and promotions.
Among all of the segmentation methods, this one provides insight into intent, helping you go beyond who your audience is to understand what they do. You can use behavioral insights to re-engage former customers with relevant offers, reward loyal buyers with personalized perks, or guide high-intent shoppers toward conversion with timely nudges, and measure performance across the customer lifecycle.
Behavioral segmentation is most powerful when combined with demographic data, giving you a better picture of both who their customers are and how they engage. We help connect behavioral signals to consumer profiles, enabling richer targeting and more accurate segment definition.
When to use behavioral segmentation
Behavioral segmentation is best when you want to personalize based on intent, habits, or engagement stage. It’s particularly useful for retention, reactivation, or cross-selling strategies.
Behavioral segmentation examples
In practice, a national big-box retailer partnered with Experian to better understand customer behavior during grocery store visits. The goal was to identify distinct “trip missions” that could drive category trial and increase basket size. We analyzed everything from basket contents to customer composition and segmented visits into 11 unique missions.
For example, the “All Aisles Online” segment represented large households (often homeowners with families) stocking up on household staples through online orders. In contrast, the “Marketable Mission” segment captured smaller, likely renter households making quick trips for non-essentials.
These behavioral insights empowered retail marketers to adjust promotions based on the intent behind each visit, strengthen customer relationships, and drive growth. This type of analysis is increasingly important as purchase journeys become more fragmented across retailers, channels, and shopping occasions.
4. Firmographic segmentation (B2B)
Firmographic segmentation is like demographic segmentation for businesses. It groups B2B audiences based on attributes such as annual revenue, location, company size, industry, and organizational structure. You can also segment by job title or decision-maker role to better target key stakeholders.
This method is essential for account-based marketing (ABM), enterprise targeting, and aligning your messaging, sales strategy, or product offerings with the unique needs of different business types. A startup in the tech sector will likely respond to a very different pitch than an enterprise manufacturer, and firmographic data helps you speak to both more accurately.
Our business data assets help B2B marketers build and activate firmographic segments at scale, so you can easily identify high-value accounts, prioritize outreach, and uncover growth opportunities across the customer lifecycle.
When to use firmographic segmentation
Use firmographic segmentation when marketing to other businesses, especially when your product or service has different benefits depending on business size or sector.
Firmographic segmentation examples
A B2B client partnered with Experian to gain a deeper understanding of the revenue potential of their existing business customers. Using firmographic data, we segmented the client’s customers into distinct groups based on the characteristics most strongly tied to spending behavior.
For each segment, we calculated potential spend, defined as the 80th percentile of annual spend within that segment. This allowed the client to identify high-value accounts with untapped growth potential.
For example, one customer, ABC Construction, had spent $4,750. But based on their segment’s profile, their annual potential was $9,000. That insight revealed a $4,250 opportunity to deepen the relationship through more targeted marketing and sales efforts.
How to choose the right segmentation method
Different marketing goals call for different segmentation approaches. Use the table below as a starting point when deciding which method to prioritize.
| Goal | Recommended segmentation method |
| Personalization | Demographic + behavioral |
| Local campaigns | Geographic |
| Customer retention | Behavioral |
| ABM | Firmographic |
| New market expansion | Geographic + demographic |
Best practices for market segmentation
Effective market segmentation is only as powerful as the data, insights, and activation strategy powering it. Whether you’re using demographic, geographic, behavioral, or firmographic segmentation, the following best practices will help you maximize performance and build more actionable audience segments.
Start with clean, reliable data
Segments are only as good as the data behind them. If your data is outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete, your segments can lead to ineffective targeting, wasted spend, and missed opportunities. That’s why the first step in any segmentation strategy is building on accurate, compliant, continuously refreshed data.
Just as important, you need data that provides a neutral foundation for audience strategy. The best segmentation data isn’t tied to a single platform or ecosystem; it should give you the flexibility to build audiences once and activate them wherever your campaigns run.
Experian Marketing Data is sourced, verified, and refreshed continuously to help you develop more reliable audience segments. As an independent data provider, we help brands operationalize data across the broader marketing ecosystem with neutrality, flexibility, and interoperability at the center of our approach.
Experian data remains available across major platforms and marketplaces, enabling you to activate audiences, connect identity, and measure performance across channels. As AI-powered marketing and automation continue to evolve, trusted identity and interoperable data are increasingly important for creating consistent audience strategies from insight to activation.
Test and refine segments continuously
Business goals, market conditions, and behaviors are constantly changing. What worked last month or even last week might not work today. By adjusting your segments over time, you make sure your marketing stays relevant, focused, and effective.
The most successful marketers treat segments as living models rather than static lists. Segmentation is an ongoing process of defining audiences, activating campaigns, measuring performance, and optimizing based on what you learn. Use A/B testing, performance metrics, and audience analytics to iterate on your segments and improve results over time.
We support ongoing segment validation through our measurement and analytics solutions, helping you connect audience strategy to campaign outcomes and close the loop between audience definition and performance.
Align segments with personalized messaging and offers
Each segment has distinct needs, preferences, and motivations, which means generic messaging won’t resonate effectively. A segment is only as valuable as your ability to translate those insights into messaging, offers, and experiences that reflect what that audience cares about.
Once you’ve built your segments, personalize your creative, copy, and offers to appeal to each group and increase the likelihood of engagement and conversions. Our consumer insights help you understand not only who to target, but also what messages are most likely to resonate and which channels are most effective for reaching those people.
Integrate segmentation across all platforms
If someone sees one message in an email and a completely different one in an ad or on your website, it creates confusion and weakens trust. Siloed segmentation strategies that only apply to a single channel can create disconnected customer experiences and undermine omnichannel performance.
From CRMs and email platforms to ad tech and analytics tools, make sure your segmentation method is applied consistently across every channel to improve performance and build a cohesive brand experience.
Our audience segments are designed for cross-platform activation, helping you reach the same people across digital advertising, direct mail, CRM, social, TV, and other channels with greater consistency and accuracy.
Segment your audiences with Experian
Effective audience segmentation is at the heart of every successful marketing strategy, but in this fragmented, privacy-conscious landscape, grouping your audience into meaningful, actionable subgroups is more challenging than ever. That’s where we come in.
With coverage of the entire U.S. population, we help you define and categorize broad audiences into precise segments using rich data on demographics, behaviors, financial profiles, and lifestyle traits. These insights make it easier to personalize messaging, optimize media spend, and drive better outcomes. Whether you’re building segments from scratch or enriching existing customer data, we provide the data infrastructure to make marketing segmentation actionable at scale.
From ready-to-use syndicated audiences to custom segments and even Contextually-Indexed Audiences that align targeting with content, we offer flexible segmentation solutions that perform across digital, TV, programmatic, and social channels.
In our most recent release, we introduced over 430 new and updated audience segments across key categories, helping you reach consumers with even greater accuracy than before:
- 119 new automotive audiences covering EV ownership, in-market shoppers, brand switchers, certified pre-owned buyers, and used vehicle purchase intent
- 31 new financial audiences spanning generational life stages, spending capacity, investment readiness, liquidity, and borrowing intent
- 89 new Mosaic audiences, including 19 lifestyle Groups and 70 detailed Types built on the latest Mosaic V8 framework
- 10 new travel audiences focused on cruise shopper behavior, brand affinity, and travel intent
- 9 new lifestyle and interest audiences covering TV viewership behaviors and AI-engaged consumers
- 180 refreshed audience segments with improved naming conventions designed to enhance discoverability across platforms and AI-powered tools
Together, these segments give marketers more accuracy to reach high-intent consumers based on real-world behaviors, spending patterns, and financial capacity.
Talk to our team about your segmentation methods today
Frequently asked questions about market segmentation
A market segment is a distinct subgroup of consumers or businesses that share common characteristics and are likely to respond similarly to a marketing message, offer, or experience. Market segments can be defined by factors such as age, location, purchasing behavior, company size, or industry.
A good market segment is measurable, reachable, distinct, actionable, and large enough to be meaningful. In other words, you should be able to identify the segment, reach it through marketing channels, understand how it differs from other audiences, and develop strategies tailored to its needs.
The most effective market segments provide straightforward opportunities for personalization, targeting, and business growth.
Market segmentation is the process of dividing a broad audience into smaller groups based on shared characteristics, such as demographics, geography, behaviors, or firmographics, to help you deliver more relevant messaging, improve targeting efficacy, and create more personalized customer experiences.
The four types of market segmentation are demographic, geographic, behavioral, and firmographic segmentation. Each reveals a different dimension of your audience and is best suited for different marketing objectives. Many marketers combine multiple segmentation methods to build a more complete view of their customers and improve campaign performance.
Market segmentation examples include a retailer targeting high-income households with premium product offerings, a B2B company segmenting prospects by company size and industry, or a national brand tailoring messaging and promotions by region using geographic segmentation.
The right segmentation method depends on your marketing goals and the audience insights you need. Use demographic segmentation to understand who your audience is, geographic segmentation to understand where they are, behavioral segmentation to understand how they engage, and firmographic segmentation to target businesses based on organizational characteristics.
Yes, you can absolutely combine segmentation methods. In fact, combining multiple segmentation methods often produces more accurate and actionable audience insights. Many marketers use demographic, geographic, behavioral, and firmographic data to create a more complete view of their audience and improve campaign performance.
We support market segmentation through comprehensive demographic, geographic, behavioral, and firmographic data solutions. Using Marketing Attributes, Mosaic, syndicated audiences, and custom targeting solutions, you can build, activate, and measure audience segments across channels.
All solutions are powered by privacy-conscious, continuously refreshed data designed to help brands reach the right audiences with greater accuracy and confidence.
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The UK digital advertising market is worth £13.44bn, an increase year-on-year of 15%, reveals the 2018 IAB UK & PwC Digital Adspend Study. Report highlights The majority of all growth is coming from smartphone advertising, which has increased by £1.65bn (35%) from 2017. Smartphone advertising now represents 51% of all UK digital ad spend, up from 45% in 2017. Video is now the largest display format (£2307m), overtaking standard display banners (£1486m). Outstream/social in-feed has increased its majority in total video spend, now occupying a share of 57%, up from 52% in 2017. Social revenue now represents 23% of all digital ad spend. Growth is predicted to slow during 2019, with 5% estimated growth (+9% digital, +11% display, +9% search) compared to 15% in 2018. 2018 marks the tipping point towards a mobile-first ecosystem “For the past few years, industry commentators have been hailing the year of mobile. Each January the predictions come and the waiting commences for evidence to mark a tipping point, a shift to a mobile-first digital ad ecosystem. Well, drumroll… it was 2018! The latest Adspend report from IAB UK and PwC reveals that spend on smartphones outstripped spend on desktop for the first time last year. Brands spent 51% of total spend (which stands at £13.44 billion) on smartphones in 2018, up from 45% in 2017 – a significant milestone in the evolution of digital advertising. “This evidence shows that advertisers are increasingly thinking mobile-first. Growth in investment has historically lagged behind the amount of time spent on the device and we expect to see growth continue at a rapid pace to keep up with audience behaviour – two thirds of time spent online is now on mobile, according to UKOM. Other areas of growth highlighted by the report include video, which accounts for 44% of the total display market, while mobile video now makes up 51% of smartphone display. This is no doubt down to bigger mobile screens, better 4G and more readily available WiFi making video ads an increasingly attractive option. “Across the board, advertisers are investing in digital for longer-term brand building as well as short-term activation, with the direct-to-consumer market helping to drive this trend. What’s more, digital continues to be an accessible and popular route to market for businesses of all sizes, from leading advertisers to SMEs.” Tim Elkington, Chief Digital Officer, IAB UK Content & context crucial for attracting audiences “As people spend more and more of their time on mobile, it’s comes as no surprise that advertisers will follow where audiences are with their marketing spend. “Video has been the driving force in this growth, indicating that engaging visual content is still key in helping brands to achieve great results and to capture consumer attention in a vast sea of digital noise. “Video still has a way to go if it is to reach the level of effectiveness of traditional formats like cinema, but it will be interesting to see how the format develops over the next year or so. Ultimately, brilliant content and properly considered context are crucial for advertisers hoping to attract relevant audiences and build strong brands long term.” Kathryn Jacob OBE, CEO, Pearl & Dean Mobile-first approach driving investment in user experience “As a mobile-first approach has become the norm for many businesses, we’ve seen significant innovation and investment in the user experience that has fuelled the rise in mobile commerce. “Yet, for some years, limitations in the technology and formats available have meant that mobile advertising couldn’t always keep pace with changing consumer behaviours – delivering weaker performance when compared to desktop. “Fortunately, mobile has made huge strides in recent years. Mobile advertising affords great targeting opportunities for brands and a more interactive and immersive experience for consumers. “There is no reason to doubt this trend will continue as advertisers design their media, creative, and targeting strategy with mobile at the heart – optimising performance, enhancing the customer experience, and delivering the best results.” James Cragg, UK Managing Director, Tug New technologies to improve investment efficiency “The UK digital ad market has continued to grow despite the various challenges that the market has faced, including the current socioeconomic climate and general changes in the industry. As spend increases, it’s important to look at how media buying can be made as efficient as possible, minimising waste and maximising the return on investment. “Marketers will start to look to new technologies, like AI, to offer an impartial and more efficient approach to media buying, allowing marketers to measure effectiveness of campaigns and allocate spend accordingly.” Carl Erik Kjaersgaard, Chief Executive, Blackwood Seven Industry going from strength to strength “This significant growth in ad spend is great to see and shows that our industry is going from strength to strength. It’s especially good to see that as advertisers invest more and more in digital advertising, they’re becoming more considered in where they’re spending their money – with a large portion of the growth coming from companies that are part of IAB’s Gold Standard. “At The Trade Desk, we’ve long been ambassadors for the importance of transparency. These findings show that it isn’t just the right thing to do, but makes good business sense as advertisers increasingly choose partners who are demonstrating a commitment to best practice.” Anna Forbes, UK General Manager, The Trade Desk Advertisers embracing mobile “As consumers spend more of their time online, it’s no surprise that digital ad spend has continued its rise, up 15% to £13.4bn. With digital, in every sense, becoming further embedded in our daily lives, it is inevitable that this number is set to rise further next year. “Given the vast majority of people using their smartphone as their primary digital device, evident from site traffic stats we see across the board, the IAB report shows that advertisers have started to fully embrace this shift by following with ad spend. Over the last few years, a combination of faster wireless connectivity along with more capable devices has made it the go-to device for consumers to get online. This is set to continue over the next few years with 5G and even faster, more capable smartphones arriving (i.e. foldables) that will further cement ‘mobile’ as the main digital device to reach consumers.” Wajid Ali, Head of Paid Search, ForwardPMX Budgets must go to professionally produced content “In the IAB’s latest ‘Digital Adspend Study’ it is positive to see that outstream continues to dominate video spend, showing close to a 10% year-on-year increase. “Unsurprisingly, the study highlights that mobile is the most important distribution device (76% of all video spend is on the smartphone), and it’s great to see the format we invented dominating that space. “However, it’s now more pertinent than ever that clients and agencies invest their outstream budgets into professionally produced content and not social infeeds. Budgets must go where content is being produced, rather than aggregators and distributors, where the content is read rather than where a click happened. “We must remember how important local, national, and vertical press are to the global digital ecosystem. By unifying the best publishers at scale, delivering mobile-optimised creativity and outcome-orientated distribution, we are fighting to ensure publishers are getting their fair share of revenue in comparison to the social platforms.” Justin Taylor, UK MD, Teads UK market in robust health “The latest IAB digital ad spend report shows encouraging signs that the UK digital advertising market is in robust health, with mobile advertising continuing its upward trend. “The rise of up-and-coming ad formats like Shopping Ads, Google’s Responsive Search Ads, and Facebook Messenger Ads show that advertisers are looking for ways to capture consumer attention in the evolving digital landscape. As a result, the lines across search, social, and e-commerce are more blurred than ever with the introduction of features like Checkout for Instagram and Shopping ads on Google Images. Furthermore, with the rapid growth of Amazon’s ads business, e-commerce has quickly emerged as a third pillar of digital advertising, making it vital for marketers to have a complete view of the customer journey across channels and devices, if they hope to more accurately understand campaign performance and attribution.” Wesley MacLaggan, SVP of Marketing, Marin Software Digital identity resolution essential in understanding customer journey “Last year’s figures show that UK ad spend is starting to mirror the behaviour of consumers who, according to UKOM data, spend two-thirds of their time online on a smartphone. The fact that mobile ad spend now surpasses that of ad spend on desktop highlights marketers’ understanding that digital identity resolution is essential, not a nice-to-have. “Appreciating the cross-device behaviours of consumers allows brands to gain a better understanding of the customer journey and build stronger relationships with their audiences long term.” Tom Rolph, VP EMEA, Tapad, a part of Experian. Contact us today
OpenAudience promises the targeting capabilities of a walled garden but without the restrictionsOpenX has lifted the lid on a targeting solution it claims will offer people-based advertising opportunities outside of the industry’s walled gardens such as Facebook and Google. Dubbed OpenAudience, the supply-side programmatic player claims the new offering is powered by proprietary data assets and is supplemented by data partnerships with partners such as LiveRamp and Tapad, a part of Experian. Initially available in the U.S., OpenAudience has a user graph of 240 million monthly users and is currently being tested with multiple marketers with a general rollout planned for the third quarter of 2019. Speaking with Adweek, OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan said the rollout would help differentiate it among its peers as for the most part ad exchanges have marketed themselves based on their impression count, not necessarily addressable audiences. Compare this with Google and Facebook, both of whom account for almost 60% of U.S. ad spend, although this is disproportionate to the amount of time spent with their properties, according to Cadogan. “The thing that has given Facebook and Google so much power is that they have people-based systems [for ad targeting] that are simple to use and operate with a massive scale that are effective, and programmatic hasn’t kept pace with that,” he said. Cadogan cited the findings of a further study by eMarketer, which indicated that marketers are increasingly reliant on such walled garden players for their online inventory supply with the latest launch geared towards capitalizing on that. The latest launch is the culmination of the California-based company’s recent strategic overhaul, namely its attempts to get to grips with an identity-based solution that provides options outside of the walled gardens. Also speaking with Adweek was Todd Parsons, OpenX’s chief product officer, who offered further insight into how OpenAudience operates including how it uses its recently sealed relationship with Google Cloud Platform and machine learning to ape the efficacy of walled garden advertising solutions. “We had to build a matching technology, which made it possible for us to talk about monthly active users instead of talking about cookies or devices,” he explained. “And it took several quarters of staffing up with the right people from the consumer data and identity space.” OpenAudience’s matching technology works by using the identity and cookie matching capabilities of cross-device specialist Tapad and data onboarder LiveRamp to formulate a persistent, deterministic ID which can then be used to match advertisers with audiences on its ad exchange. “So, the idea isn’t for us as a company to put our future into one provider,” added Parsons. “It is to provide a matching technology that uses the best of several.” OpenAudience will also include involve additional tie-ups to offering further demographic information on the 240 million monthly U.S. users such as location, etc., which is currently in testing. “We felt like we needed to be very different about enabling marketers and publishers to activate against that data,” added Parsons. He further added that OpenX wants to rival Facebook’s levels of service when it comes to helping publishers monetize audiences on the social network, except this time on the open web. “No one has actually pushed identity and consumer data into the hands of publishers in a way that you might unify the view of audiences across many websites.” OpenX’s Cadogan summed up the OpenAudience offering and how it may look to advertisers when he said, “Imagine the open web is one publisher, and this lets buyers look at it as a single entity and market to them accordingly.” Contact us today
Everyone knows that it’s important for businesses to have a clearly defined brand. In the modern world, the personal brand has become just as important, and many professionals are trying to build up their public reputation, expertise and industry authority. In the digital age, there are many different methods and channels you can use to build your personal brand, but some are more efficient than others. According to Forbes Agency Council, here are some of the most effective ways to develop an authentic personal brand.1. Give More Than You Receive Whatever you do, always aim at giving more than you receive. When you build your network, try to bring value to each new person that you meet. When you get featured in some media, see what you can do for them in return. This is the best strategy because actions speak louder than words. People will remember you for what you are, not what your website is. – Solomon Thimothy, OneIMS 2. Define What You Stand For, Then Align Your Actions Define your mission. What is your purpose? What do you want to accomplish, and what is your key message? Once you have answers to those questions, use that mission as a guiding North Star to consistently reinforce your personal brand every day. This will come across in how you lead, how you interact with employees and peers, how you communicate, and how you give back to the community. – Preethy Vaidyanathan, Tapad 3. Develop A Creative Positioning Statement It’s all about positioning your company. You need to have creative positioning statements about who you are and what your company is doing to benefit its clients. Clients want resolutions to their problems, and that’s where you come to the rescue. It’s either sold or ignored. – Cagan Sean Yuksel, GRAFX CO. 4. Speak At An Event Becoming a keynote speaker gives you access to the things you need to elevate your brand: influencer status, large audiences and media profile. But access doesn’t equal attention. While speaking gives you the platform, you need to have something compelling to say. You’ll need a differentiated message, unique presentation style and a great agent to make this strategy successful. – Andrew Au, Intercept Group 5. Focus On A Specific Audience The most effective way to build your personal brand is to create content specifically for a very specific group of people. Create relevant content that details solutions to the unique needs of this audience so that it spreads quickly due to its hyper-relevance. This creates authority and credibility for your personal brand and helps you stand out as being the most relevant expert in your field. – Adam Guild, Placepull 6. Be Ruthlessly Consistent Developing a personal brand requires ruthless consistency in your subject matter and how you present yourself to the world. I go back to the early days of marketing blogs. In those days, some bloggers were all over the map with content. The ones who were consistent with their audience and their goals are the ones who had staying power. They became the authors, speakers and consultants. – Scott Baradell, Idea Grove 7. Follow Through Just like a traditional brand, the quality of your offering helps to build your brand. If you are clear on what you can and cannot deliver and always follow through on your word, your personal brand reputation will precede you and will be lifted by the recommendations of others. – Kieley Taylor, GroupM 8. Build A Solid Reputation “Personal brand” is just a new-age name for reputation. Doing your job exceptionally well, going above and beyond, treating people with respect and kindness, having a point of view—essentially any action that builds a solid professional reputation does the very same for your personal brand. – Jess Cook, TMV Group 9. Define Your Voice Establish your unique voice and personal point of view and stick to it in all you do and all you say. Personal brands must be consistent and have consistency in messaging, attitude and behavior. Express your personal brand through comments on articles, at significant events and important platforms where it can best showcase and support your personal point of view and brand persona. – Pat Fiore, FIORE 10. Create And Share Video Content Video is hard for many people. That’s why it can be your competitive advantage if you do it. Video allows you to be seen, heard and felt emotionally in a way that no other medium can. You may say, “That’s not for me” and that’s fine, but good luck competing with those who embrace it. Barriers to video are so low that building a personal brand without it seems as if you are hiding something. – A. Lee Judge, Content Monsta 11. Share Your Point of View In Everything You Do There are a finite number of topics that make for interesting discussion in our industry, so having a point of view and sharing it through crafted content is vital for building your personal brand. You don’t have to be controversial, necessarily, but considering themes and topics and providing honest commentary that demonstrates experience is the quickest way to build your reputation. – David Harrison, EVINS 12. Stay True To You The most effective way to build your personal brand is to be true to who you are. If you are wildly creative and outgoing, show that in your branding! Don’t hold back in your content; post that crazy Instagram picture that shows the world how you think. If you are conservative, then own that. This passion for who you really are—and what your company really is—authentically shines through. – Katy Boos, Remix Marketing Inc. Contact us today