NBC Digital scraps Madison Ave demographics in favor of personas

Douglas Burdett points us to a fascinating story in the Media Post NBC News Kills The Demographic, Personifies Its Viewers Instead written by Joe Mandese.

The Media Post piece talks about how NBC News Digital is abandoning the traditional Madison Avenue demographics approach that has been used for decades that uses attributes like age, income, race, sex, and other factors to cluster audiences. This demographic approach is how advertising space has been bought and sold for a generation.

The new buyer persona approach on is based on their actual behaviors rather than a list of attributes.

The Media Post article lists the four personas used by NBC Digital as:

• "Always On:" Consumers who are constantly connected to news feeds across multiple devices throughout their waking day.


• "Reporters:" A slightly smaller segment of "digital natives" who grew up consuming news via online and mobile media, and who have manifested the behaviors of news disseminators, taking pride in their ability to break important news to their friends via their own social media postings.


• "Skimmers:" Consumers who are not passionately connected to news.


• "Veterans:" Consumers who primarily rely on traditional media as a trusted source for news.

NBC Digital is using the personas both to develop new content and to pitch advertisers.

Buyer personas and your marketing

The idea of buyer personas is difficult for many people who are used to traditional demographics to grasp. In a New Marketing Masterclass I recently conducted for several dozen consumer marketers, we were discussing a brand of premium grooming products for men and as I probed the buyer personas they target with the product, I heard language like: "Upscale, young, urban men in their twenties." This is a classic Madison Avenue approach and not as effective as a persona based approach. When I pushed a little about the market and who buys the products, we ended up with language like: "Shy single men who spend lots of money on products to increase their chances of finding a girlfriend."

Now we're talking! It is tough to create marketing for "Upscale, young, urban men in their twenties," which is why so much advertising ends up focused on the product attributes. However, creating marketing for "Shy single men who spend lots of money on products to increase their chances of finding a girlfriend," would be fun!

I recommend that you actually name your buyer personas. With the example above, we could name the buyer persona "Shy Sam." Armed with this sort of persona, marketers can then create online content that appeals directly to them. How about an ebook with a title like: "How to get a close shave that women love."

They key here is to develop buyer personas using actual input from interviews. You can’t just make this stuff up. The nuggets of gold here is that "Shy Sam" is shy and has trouble finding a girlfriend. You don’t guess at that. Rather you learn from your interviews with 25 or so members of the Shy Sam persona.

Buyer personas will transform your marketing. Building your content strategy around buyer personas is much more effective than prattling on about what your products and services do. With a switch to buyer personas, many organizations have dramatically better marketing success.

My book The New Rules of Marketing & PR uses buyer personas as a fundamental starting point of great marketing. If you want even more, my friend Adele Revella of the Buyer Persona Institute has great information.

I'm always looking for examples of buyer persona success. I'll be sharing an example from a professional services firm in the next week or two.

Comments

[Tony Zambito]

Hi David,

Hope all is well and you look great. The article was interesting. I was very glad to see the use of third-party research to arrive at the cluster of personas. Nielsen attempted behavior-based targeting once before and had difficulty. This attempt looks more solid and is research-backed. Buyer personas continue to evolve and will continue to do so. As companies attempt to adapt to market and behavioral shifts - the use of expertise in research, particularly value of third-party unbiased research, will be more understood as well as appreciated. Thanks for being an advocate all these years!

Tony Zambito
@tonyzambito

[David Meerman Scott]

Thanks Tony!

[Harry Henry]

Hi David - agree that this is the way consumer marketing is moving and glad to see the shift. There are a few firms doing some great work building personnas and segmentation on the consumer marketing side.

One of the next industry challenges will be for the infrastructure that supports marketing to catch up. For example, if I want to find a group of males 20-39 to market to, there are all sorts of lists, magazines, on-line audiences and broadcasters I can use as an avenue to reach them. Transitioning to finding the "Shy Sams" or other behavior groups is a road not yet paved.

[David Meerman Scott]

Harry, great point on the infrastructure.

Your comment brought two things to mind: 1) the idea of buyer personas might be even more important for B2B companies as consumer brands. And 2) the best marketing is done by companies who develop their own personas and create their own content rather than picking from some vendor's lists.

[Adele Revella]

Thanks so much for linking to my site, David. Your books and presentations have clearly taken the need for buyer personas to the masses. I was happy to see that NBC based their personas on research, but their marketers missed out on the chance to do this work themselves, positioning the marketing team as the source of these strategies, not just project managers.

The buyer experts are the people who interview the buyers, not the people who pay for them.

I'm also dismayed when companies like NBC publish their findings -- why give their competitors this insight? Orbitz did something similar a few months ago, revealing that Mac users spent more on a hotel night than PC users. That revelation sparked a firestorm of controversy, and handed these valuable insights to other travel services. Crazy. I wrote a blog post about Orbitz that people might find interesting http://bit.ly/MX1oJM.

Thanks again David.

[David Meerman Scott]

Adele, as usual you have some keen insights. This quote is genius: "The buyer experts are the people who interview the buyers, not the people who pay for them."

And while people like me like hearing about personas, you're right that there is a competitive advantage to keeping things internal.

Thanks for taking the time to comment.

[Wayne Cerullo]

Great story, David. We should focus on one particularly telling point about your example.

Think about "Shy Sam". Do you think marketers figured out that Sam is shy by sitting around a conference table? Or by reviewing pounds of questionnaires that Sam filled out describing himself as "shy" or "looking for a girlfriend"?? Hint: those are rhetorical questions.

"You can’t just make this stuff up"... but there are marketers who have turned "personas" into the "solution marketing" buzzword of 2012 without doing the real insight work to make them work. That's dangerous. And costly. ANd a missed opportunity left open to your competitors.

[David Meerman Scott]

Wayne - you are absolutely right.

I can't tell you how many marketers tell me about their wonderful personas. When I probe, it's just them sitting in their conference room backing into a persona based on their product or service attributes.

[Chris Boudreaux]

David, How are you seeing brands buy media with their internally-defined personas? What is the best-practice translation process from persona to media buy?

P.S. TypePad OAuth to Twitter failed on 4 attempts. : )

[David Meerman Scott]

Chris - Sorry about the login stuff. Not sure what is happening... I'm not an expert in media buying so I can't really comment on that. I'm a much bigger fan of earning attention by publishing content for free than buying attention with advertising.