Audience Selling

Posted by: Matt Shanahan

For a market to exist, there needs to be both buyers and sellers. With all the recent articles on about advertisers and agencies engaged in audience buying, it figures that there would be articles about publishers engaged in audience selling. After googling “audience selling,” I was surprised with the dearth of results. This was the top hit for audience buying ( Digital Marketing Guide: Audience Buying on AdAge from 2010), and this was the top hit for audience selling (Sell Your Audience, Not Your Product on BusinessWeek from 2005). Audience selling as a specific phrase is so absent that it won’t surprise me if this blog post makes the first page of results on Google for audience selling.

So are agencies and advertisers really buying audiences, or are they buying proxies for audiences? Most likely they are buying the latter and here’s why. When you look at order management systems for ads, the systems still focus on buying placements. And while the order can have a target qualifier for the placement, it falls short of actually buying audience.

Today’s tools for publishers are designed to sell placements with audience as a qualifier. What if the target audience is spread across three sections? Does the advertiser have to buy three placements? Today the answer is yes but the insight to do so doesn’t exist. Consequently, both the advertiser and the publisher miss out. Publishers need tools that help them sell audiences with placement as the qualifier.

True audience buying won’t happen until there is true audience selling. In the next couple of blog entries, I’ll cover requirements for new tools that can optimize ad operations by provide audience inventory planning, placement selection, and target identification. In the meantime, I’ll be watching to see how this post ranks on the keywords audience selling.