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Targeted Advertising: Know You Are Audience
- 17 March, 2025
- Mala Annamma Mathew
Targeted advertising is not as new as we think it is.
Let’s forgo the old-school Egyptian Hieroglyphics advertising or the 1800s billboards. But instead, begin our story with the birth of The Golden Age of Advertising (the early 1920s).
The advent of strategic advertising used demographics (sex, income, age, etc.) to target their mass audiences. The product was the focus of the market strategy. It started with product-based marketing, a get-what-you-need approach, which evolved to an image or impression-based strategy, which is more complex.
Think “Diamonds are forever”. Linked to proposals and marriages, or status and wealth, that’s good old image-based marketing. “Cool people wear Ray-Ban sunglasses”— that creates an image.
However, by the 1970s, the market became media-oriented—everyone was advertising. So how do you stand out?
Social scientists proposed “psychographics”.
Psychographic segmentation targets an audience based on beliefs, motivation, and behaviors. This shift in audience segmentation to include “lifestyle” with demographics, changed the media buying game —”niche” became the new norm.
Thus, psychographics created a position-based market.
Position-based marketing helped counter the vast amount of competitors for products and services by creating a favourable, long-lasting “position” in consumer minds. This, by highlighting product merits in relation to competitors.
So yes, the attempt to influence brand perception favourably.
While the brand and the product were always the centres of marketing… that’s not the case anymore. Today, the consumer is the focus. But how?
Starting from the first online banner ad in 1994, the first version of pay-per-click advertising in 1996, to the advent of Mobile Advertising in the 2000s ( started with SMS ads—the original annoying forwards), and till the digital personalised advertising today— advertising grows closer and closer to your personal space.
Is it ethical? That’s a minefield for another day!
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