The Psychology of Media Buying

This article that I've just read is so interesting I'm posting the link to it: http://adage.com/article?article_id=136408

It's an AdAge article that discusses the findings of Mindset Media, a psychographic research company that has recently discovered that personality may play more of a role in what media people tend to use than mere demographics would predict. Now, it's no longer that younger people like to use the Internet while older generations like print media; instead, "Top web users rank high in openness, and to a smaller degree, those who rank high in bravado are top users, too. Those highly open people who favor the web are 153% more likely to always buy organic products and 104% more likely to drive a hybrid car."

Now more than ever, it seems, it's important to know exactly who your target audience is, to create an actual person who embodies the core ideas of this market, and to really cater your advertising -especially your media buying- to this one person. Is s/he extraverted or introverted? Is s/he a leader or a follower? Is s/he a trendsetter or a conformist? Etc.

The breakthrough discovery of this research company may seem obvious at first glance; of course personality influences what media you use. Some people like TV while others don't, and some just don't have time for it altogether. Women are more likely to read magazines than men are. The same goes for other media- newspapers, the Internet, and outdoor advertising, among others. However, would you have thought that the amount that you watch TV, read magazines, or use the Internet would be influenced by how outgoing you are? By whether or not you look before you leap in making decisions? Maybe it's just the fact that I was a psychology major for a semester, but this finding seems to me to be an extremely meaningful one in the world of media buying, not to mention the entire marketing sphere.

If used correctly, this research would help both to make the media advertisers invest in much cheaper, and have more results in terms of consumers actually buying products. It would allow companies to speak to consumers on a more personal level, and isn't that what we're always aiming for?

I have to wonder, though, what effect this will have on the current trend of optimistic advertising in this economic recession. All automakers, for example, are offering some form of price protection, and these have made most of the car commercials that I've seen seem pretty generic. If they take into account their target people, and make their advertising prevalent in the media they know these people will use (based on both their personalities and their demographics), will these seemingly generic ads become differentiated and more effective? Does personality have an effect on how the creative for these ads should be executed as well? Perhaps that has to do with culture as a whole, but would creative be more effective if it really was catered towards the people it's targeting?

These findings bring up a slew of questions about the effectiveness of the advertising that we currently do, and about why, if these findings seem kind of obvious at first glance, we haven't already harnessed the potential of personality in creating campaigns for our products? Some brands have, and I think these are the ones that really have been successful- Dove, Visa, and American Express, to name a few.

Whether or not this discovery will indeed have an effect on the way media is bought and used by agencies and clients in the future, it nevertheless teaches everyone about the importance of psychology in every aspect of life.