Marketers are turning to identity management firms and data onboarders to either identify or combine the necessary data sets for ad targeting. A marketer might take known customer information such as phone numbers and household addresses and look to match these to email addresses to power a more individual-level ad targeting approach. But the reverse is also true: A marketer may look to take individual-level identifiers and match them to households, so as to capitalize on direct mail or other household-level targeting initiatives.
For the majority of marketers, however, a blend of both is increasingly required to tie together the holistic customer view—across both addressable and nonaddressable media.
Chobani is one such firm continually looking to balance individual- and household-level targeting throughout their campaign efforts. The marketing team looks at basic demographic overlays, such as a mother living in suburban Chicago. From there, Chobani may also use a variety of first-, second- or third-party data sources to further develop and segment audiences. Once those segments are identified, Chobani weighs the feasibility of targeting those audiences at the individual- vs. household-level against the capabilities of the desired targeting channels.
“We’re only limited by the technology limitations in the space,” Eddie Revis, senior director of marketing communications for the yogurt giant. “The individuals we want live in a household. But if that household is filled with dad, who doesn’t eat dairy, and two young kids that we will never market to, then we only want to speak to the mom. So we’ll go to an individual level with that household. So even if you’re looking at a household, you still want to look at the individual makeup of that household.”