Who says that's what you have to like?

After watching the Ted Talk above my teacher Theresa Formant has asked us to discuss the following. This will be based mostly on my personal opinion. I will touch on how I expect evolving audience segmentation to affect advertising strategies and spending? How will this change the way companies do business? What will change and what will stay the same?

I’m a 16-year-old boy who is popular in school. I’m dating all the most relevant girls, I hang out with all the most relevant boys, but I love Italian opera shows... Well obviously this isn't me but it may be someone out there. So how is there any way to reach a person like this with a relevant advertising message?

We have come to see as psychographic research prevails that no two people are alike. It isn’t because you are a popular teen boy that you are going to enjoy action thrillers.  Your personal background, life experiences, beliefs and values strongly come into play when shaping a person’s thoughts and decisions.

With the huge growth in Social Media through the past decade, we as advertising have started to be able to reach people on a much more personable level. We can now see that people are so different. This vehicle also allows us to see the waste of money that is often invested into a market segment that is based purely on the assumptions of the companies and marketers. You cannot expect people to enjoy your product based on their demographics or geographic. However, reaching the most beneficial target audience comes at a price, a very, very expensive price. I think the future holds a lot more spending on audience segmentation.  Advertising will not feature so much of the target audience in their advertising, because these people range in shape and size. I think advertising will be focused more on plots and ideas that they know will appeal to the “Italian Opera goers.”

They will definitely being using social media as a means to reach the desired audiences, however companies may be instilling more mandatory surveys.  They will likely collect key consumer insights, try to find common patterns of psychographics amongst their consumer base and market accordingly. Companies may sell these surveys amongst each other if they see that it could be of relevance to one another. I believe that the more companies use these vehicles for research, the cheaper and easier it will become.

I truly believe that it is breaking barriers and changing stereotypes. We should expect to see a lot more ads that capture the essence of a person’s desires, instead of the glorified version of what advertisers think they should be. In the end it will be beneficial to both consumers (who will get the products they really want) and for the companies ( who will be investing their ad dollars in the best places to see a big return on investment.)