Cutting through the noise of advertising

A recent ClickZ article by Sean Carton brings up an invaluable point for marketers aiming to make sense of the digital landscape moving into 2012 - with TVs, laptops, tablets and mobile phones all becoming staples of many middle-class and affluent lifestyles, advertisers can no longer be sure that the ads they're spending  so much money on are being noticed by the consumers that they are targeting.

There are now more touch point and  platforms available that marketers can leverage to reach consumers. In a world of distraction, Carton writes, this over-exposure can amount to white noise, and there's no telling that the users of these devices are even paying attention to the ads around them.

"Think about it: if consumers' attention is being split between their iPads and their TVs, how effective are the spots many of us are spending so much money on placing in front of them? Considering the competition for attention, it's no surprise that...so many are turning to social media as a way of reaching consumers," said Carton. "In a media marketplace that's increasingly fragmented and deficient in consumer attention, social media is one place where people tend to spend lots of time (23 percent by some estimates) engaged with content and opinions."

Carton raises the obvious point of targeting advertising to make an impression, but it's not enough to merely take one's efforts to the social networks. Millions of people use sites like Facebook, and without the proper knowledge of whom they're targeting, marketers will be wasting their ad spend and will not achieve the necessary results on the campaigns.

Semcasting provides a solution to marketers seeking an analytic edge over their competitors. Semcasting's facebook microTargeting employs extensive demographic and psychographic data to help create reliable, predictive models of online users that marketers can then use to target the most qualified Facebook users. This unique approach helps advertisers cut through the noise and deliver the right messages to potential prospects.