Why digital traders need to zag rather than zig
ZenithOptimedia’s Richard Shotton explains the power of a contrarian approach in programmatic
John Hegarty famously said that “when the world zigs, zag.” His plea for distinctiveness is normally applied to creative but it’s equally relevant for digital buying.
It’s true for buying because more media than ever is traded programmatically. This means that trading is increasingly done on an impression by impression basis, often via an auction. And the most successful strategy for buying at an auction is to avoid the crowd.
The essence of an auction is that competition increases prices. If you chase after the same impressions as your competitors then you’ll be in a busy auction and pay over the odds. Instead, a brand wants an auction with few participants and the way to ensure that is to unearth a unique signal that identifies whether a customer is valuable or not.
Most brands judge the value of an impression by looking for signals about age or income. This leaves plenty of under-exploited opportunities for canny brands. One opportunity, that few brands currently capitalise on, is to target people by the browser they use.
Does browser usage really tell us about customers?
The first experiment that investigated whether browser usage could identify customer behaviours was conducted by Dr Michael Housman. He analysed data from 50,000 people who his recruitment software company had helped find call centre or customer service jobs. He discovered that browser choice accurately predicted job performance.
People who opted for a non-default browser, like Chrome or Firefox, lasted 15% longer in their jobs than those with a default browser, like Internet Explorer. That wasn’t the only difference.
They were 19% less likely to miss work through illness and after 90 days they were generating client satisfaction levels that it took Internet Explorer users 120 days to reach. Impressive differences.
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But what explains the variation?
Housman attributed it to the fact that choosing Chrome or Firefox was an active decision – they took the effort to seek out a better browsing solution than the one pre-installed on their PC.
“I think that the fact that you took the time to install Firefox on your computer shows us something about you. It shows that you’re someone who is an informed consumer,” he explained to Freakonomics Radio.
“You’ve made an active choice to do something that wasn’t default.”
An experiment to test the marketing application
Targeting consumers by their browser choice is useful for marketers too. Perhaps people who avoid the mainstream, default browser choice might do the same in other markets? A mainstream brand should therefore target default browsers, while a challenger brand should focus on non-default browser users.
ZenithOptimedia tested this hypothesis by questioning 224 nationally representative lager drinkers about their brand of choice. My colleague, Claire Linford and I then split the results by their favoured browser.
The results were clear-cut. Only a third of lager drinkers who used Internet Explorer preferred a beer from outside the mainstream, top five lagers. However, 56% of those who didn’t use a default browser preferred a non-mainstream lager.
Default browser users preferred mainstream choices, non-default browser users liked challenger brands. Just as browser choice gave Housman a clue about job performance it can identify brand preference for marketers.
Browser choice is just one of many under-exploited opportunities. As a growing volume of media is bought via auctions then brands must dedicate more time to unearthing untapped signals that identify their target audience.
Richard Shotton is head of insight at ZenithOptimedia
Twitter: @rshotton