Why ask why?

So what is the relevance of asking WHY in advertising? The old adage used to be location, location, location, which is useful if you’re planning to open a Starbucks, or even in you work in something like product placement. But the core driver of any advertising response is what is the prospect’s underlying motivation, and how can an advertiser tap into it? This is not as sinister as it sounds, the truth is people like spending money, and the companies that figure out a motivation profile that can be used to reach out to their sales prospects are the ones who are going to make the big bucks. Ads that are intrusive and irrelevant can be annoying as all hell, but ads that are on point, address your specific needs, and are timed to coincide with your looking for a specific product can be a real time-saver (not to mention cost-effective for the advertiser).

The benefit of applying psychometric profiling to advertising means you can get out of the realm of 2% response rates on direct marketing initiatives (in fact, that number is probably even lower now), and get into a mode where your hit rate can climb upwards of 90%. I know this sounds like marketing hype, but I’ve worked with this type of technology before, and the results were so good we actually hesitated to use them, for fear of not being believed. So all this loops back to the statement I made a few weeks ago, the delivery mechanisms are leaping forward by leaps and bounds, the real trick to make advertising really click with the prospect is in targeting a precise, motivation-based message at the right time. I’ll go into more detail on this on my next post.