Valley PR Blog

Narrow target marketing

By Angelo Fernando on September 24th, 2007 In Marketing, Media

Megan Smith, a girl in Scranton, Pennsylvania one day looked up at a billboard and saw her name on it.

Wilkes University knew it was on her short list of colleges and decided to “talk” to her using one heck of an expensive ad buy. But it was more than an outdoor ad buy. It was a way of creating buzz among the target community that soon began to call her to say they had seen her name on posters in the mall and on MTV. Megan, an editor of her high school newspaper, was one of six students in that very narrow target.

The billboard creative was simple but it’s power was in its unusually direct approach that was worked nicely into the copy:

“Megan Smith” As editor of the West Scranton High newspaper, you can spot the the typo on this sign. That attention to detail will serve you well at Wilkes University. Megan, call a Colonel 570-408-6032.

There were other components. See the Hello Wilkes campaign site. (It has the Megan billboard on the fifth square on the top). There was also a personalized TV spot, equally brilliant. It did not address Megan, but playing off the knowledge of her interests, speculated that she was too busy to watch TV, so could one of her friends please call her and tell her she was being sought after?

There are many lessons for us here:

1. Exploiting the medium: In marketing and advertising, we tend to think of being creative as falling into the visual excellence category, rather than using the medium to make the concept more memorable and actionable. A billboard without a picture and just a phone number may not seem cool, but it does the job amazingly well in this case.

2. Knowing thy customer: Market intelligence can be used creatively. Megan Smith has apparently registered with Wilkes, so they knew she was into tennis, art, drama club etc as this TV spot shows.

3. Getting them to act on it. The billboard had a target audience of one, but it provoked others around Megan to act on it so she would make the ultimate call to action. The ‘typo’ question is almost irresistible.

My conclusion: Sometimes we use visuals in the same way we use databases –as a crutch. Targeting involves a lot more than pictures and numbers. What we save from not doing expensive photo shoots, we could put into a creative media buy.

OK, now – did YOU spot the typo in the copy above?

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