A blog that we frequnetly visit, the excellent freakonomics hosted on the New York Times website, alerted us to another feather in the bow for iPhone users. They are having more sex than those who use a Blackberry or phones run using Android. The analysis was carried out by OKCupid, an online dating site in the US. As you can see on the graph above it is all good news for the iPhone users amongst us. The sample size is 9,785 and the age spread is comprehensive.

As you might expect the survey was picked up by a number of news agencies, including networks in America and beyond. We are just suckers for a little smut it seems.

The ability to personalise advertisements according to the preferences of individual users represents a fundamental paradigm shift in the advertising world.

Traditional advertising is based either on the current content that is being consumed or on demographics. Delivering more effective personalised advertisements requires an understanding of individual users and their motivations, that goes far beyond the broad demographics traditionally relied on to inform advertising campaigns.

To explore this concept of personalised advertising, we [the Amdocs Innovation Centre] carried out behavioural analysis studies in co-operation with some of our multinational mobile operator customers. Mobile operators allowed us access to fully anonymised user data covering the activity of over 5,000,000 subscribers over several months. From this data we created a behavioral profile for each user by leveraging a wide variety of available data sources such as mobile internet browsing history, mobile advertisement selections, previous purchases and anonymous demographics.

Targeting the right people isn’t as obvious as it may seem

Analysing the user interactions with different advertisements enabled us to automatically identify the most relevant advertisements likely to appeal to each user. Behavioral profiles allow us to identify the specific characteristics that drive users to select a certain advertisement.

It is important to realise that people are complex beings with a variety of motivations; relying on a user’s top interest to guide targeting can often be misleading. For example, and contrary to expectation, the most relevant factor for people clicking on an advertisement for a popular children’s toy was that the people were interested in fashion, current affairs, lifestyle and technology. It emerged that rather than the children themselves, that these were the mothers of children interested in these toy advertisements. Targeting advertisements at these women based on their top interests would have meant that they would never have received the advertisements for the toys.

To show the effectiveness of this approach we compared our personalised targeting to targeting based on demographic information such as age, home location and gender. We found that our techniques were five times more effective than the demographic targeting. Interestingly, combining demographic data with subscriber behavioral intelligence further boosted results showing that these two information sources are complimentary.

People are not stereotypes

One of the key discoveries of our research is that people are not stereotypes. Take for example user 1259bf8963 who, through their advertisement interaction, showed a keen interest in football and a noted disinterest in fashion. Going against the stereotype, user 1259bf8963 was actually female. If an operator had relied on demographics alone, user 1259bf8963, who we fondly named Patricia, would never have been targeted with football advertisements. Patricia’s case also highlighted the fact that often demographic information can be unreliable or contradictory. From her demographic information Patricia had a university degree, earned an exceptionally high salary, was married, had children and all by the ripe old age of 20. Perhaps Patricia is some kind of superwoman but we think this is unlikely.

Companies invest vast amounts of time attempting to identify their target audience. We believe, and our analysis shows, that the more you know about your consumers the more personalised the experience you can offer them. Our findings show that when trying to identify a target audience don’t rely solely on demographics, don’t stereotype and don’t underestimate the depth of user data that can be leveraged.

Bio

Dr. Evelyn Balfe is the Business Innovation Analyst in the Amdocs Innovation Centre in Dublin. Amdocs is a global leader in providing innovative software and service solutions designed to help companies build stronger, more profitable customer relationships.

For advertisers who have wondered what percentage of their target consumers are researching online before purchasing offline or who want to compare the role of online in the consumer journey from research to purchase, help is now at hand.
The IAB Europe in partnership with Google has launched the new Consumer Commerce Barometer (CCB). The CCB is a free online research tool which uses TNS data to provide agencies and advertisers with consumer insights across 27 countries and 36 product categories.
Using the tool, marketers can select a country or multiple countries and then choose different verticals to understand how likely consumers are to research and purchase online. The data in the tool will be updated every year to help marketers identify and quantify shifting consumer behaviour over time.
Catherine Borrel, research manager with the IAB Europe said: “We support this initiative because it will help everyone working in the digital advertising industry understand and compare the different ways consumers behave both by market, and by sector. This complements existing IAB Europe annual research on online advertising spend and consumer activities and attitudes by shedding light on the internet’s role in the purchase process across this diverse region.”
Henry Eccles, product marketing manager, Google Europe said: “In the past, understanding consumer behaviour entailed guesswork or the expensive collation of disparate third party data sets. Today, the Consumer Commerce Barometer provides agencies and advertisers with a free one-stop-shop where they can quickly and easily analyse consumer behaviour across different products and countries and target their resources more effectively.”