Effective digital targeting of affluent consumers

For years, marketers and advertisers have been bending over backwards trying to come up with ways to target their ads toward the most affluent American consumers, or those who make $100,000 or more each year. While wealthy Americans are obviously ideal candidates for advertising campaigns, they have also been the hardest to reach from a marketing perspective because, at least statistically, they're the lightest media users in the country.

However, new hope for advertisers may be on the horizon. A new study from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reveals that while affluent Americans are indeed less likely to turn on the television or radio, they are far more likely to plug in to digital media than most other Americans. According to the study, most Americans spend about 34 hours each week in front of the tube, and a total of 16 hours listening to the radio, making them prime targets for outbound advertising. High-income earners, however, spend on average of about half as much time on both activities. The good news is that 98 percent of high-income earners spend an average of 26 hours surfing the net each week. That's in comparison to 79 percent of the general population, who use the internet only about 21 hours each week.

Affluent individuals are more likely to spend time on a computer, smartphone or tablet device than they are sitting in front of the television or radio. In fact, smartphones are currently the most popular digital tool of choice, with orders surpassing those for PCs for the first time in history. The IAB study shows that they are not only the perfect candidates for online advertisement, but they are more likely to click on the advertisements - as long as they are relevant.

An advertisement in itself just isn't enough to capture the attention of affluent Americans, however. In order to be effective, the ads must be targeted so that they address other demographic attributes of high-income earners.

Semcasting IP Audience Zones addresses this problem by helping advertising agencies pinpoint their audience. Through the use of genetic algorithms and thousands of predictive models that account for other factors like age, political affiliation and life stage, Semcasting has separated the United States into 580,000 "zones" and accounted for over 750 different demographic variables. Using all of this comprehensive information, advertisers can send carefully crafted messages to their intended audiences in order to produce the greatest return on a business' advertising investment.