• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, October 1, 2014

Audience targeting and buying may appear to be the hot, (relatively) new terms of the ad industry, but Brian Wieser, senior analyst at Pivotal Research, contends the roots of audience targeting go back -- way back. In fact, “late 19th century audience targeting” was actually one of the titles of his slides at the OMMA Audience Targeting event at Advertising Week in New York on Wednesday.

Wieser said he spoke with a Harvard Business School professor that has tracked the history of targeting, and the professor pointed out that magazines sharing their subscriber lists was an early form of audience targeting.

“Scholastic was able to build a business with lists,” Wieser noted. “A list of teacher is audience targeting, I think” he said. “They need erasers, blackboards, etc.” (Scholastic was founded in 1920.)

Jumping forward a few decades, Wieser said he spoke with an ex-marketer from the 1960s that pointed out that the demographic-based targeting used in TV during that era laid the groundwork for “audience targeting” as we know it today. Companies such as Simmons and MRI (Mediamark Research and Intelligence, now known as GfK) had data around audience propensity to buy certain products, Wieser said. 

“You could probably do pretty good research on the millions of people who watched those shows and bought those products [in the 60s],” he said. “You just didn’t have all the data you needed to really realize this potential at that time.”

There was some data, such as repeat viewing data from Nielsen, that marketers began using at to create loyalty inside of audience segments. Wieser reasons this was the first version of audience capping.

In the early 2000s, the bulk of companies buying against audiences on the Web were direct response (DR), performance-based marketers. Wieser said there were only a “few pioneers” at this time.

In 2007, the first true ad exchanges and ad tech companies began cropping up. Trading desks began forming, Wieser noted, while the long-tail inventory of the Web was expanding and wasn’t being monetized well. It was during this time advertisers recognized they could reach the same audience via exchanges for less money than ad networks, Wieser said, but no action was truly taken until the following year.

When the financial crisis hit in September and October 2008, Wieser said he got “so many calls” from marketers asking: “So, can you tell me more about how I can save money while reaching the same audience?”

"That’s what catalyzed a lot of this stuff,” Wieser said, referencing the 2008 downturn. “You had advertisers who became heroes for cutting their budget, [even though] they may not have had a choice.”

Looking at Wieser’s (admittedly unquantified and mostly anecdotal) brief history of audience targeting, and one major point sticks out: Marketers have a history of not changing the way they do things until they are forced to or until it becomes obvious the change would be a positive one. A recession should not be necessary for marketers to ask themselves how they can be more efficient.

So my question is: What’s next? What’s currently written on the wall that the industry will look back on and wonder why a change wasn’t made sooner?