SBT – State Based Targeting

What is television? Really? Moving images? Is is broadcast infrastructure? I ask the question because the television broadcasters need to ask themselves just that question. What are they going to do in the future? What is the core of their business that they’re going to stick by when technology and behaviour changes?

I ask the same question for printed newspapers and magazines. What’s the use of print if we have the net?

I would say that television is neither moving images, since a show could theoretically be stills only and still be good, nor is it infrastructure since everything obviously is going to be moving towards one single information infrastructure (IP-based) in a near future. Rather, television’s target segment is a behaviour pattern.

While for example “surfing the web” (excuse the worn terminology) requires choice and activity, television makes most of the choices for you. “Just sit back and enjoy the ride”. Looking instead at news consumption, surfing a news site is a fairly active venture, while flipping through a morning newspaper is more laid back and is perhaps done while leaning back in a chair with a cup of hot coffee. Again, a television network’s core business is to take people for a relaxed ride, while a website provides a tool. A newspaper’s core business is to provide a comfortable, layed back coffee experience, while a news site’s dito is to provide fast and accurate information. We can and should target our communication based on this knowledge.

I call this SBT, “State Based Targeting”. When doing strategy work from an SBT-perspective, demographic segmentation is perhaps not always relevant. Instead we want to target people in a certain situation, feeling certain feelings, and being in a certain state. An example would be to find cars with parking tickets on them and attach another piece of communication, fastened under the other wiper. We then guess with fairly good accuracy what kind of state he or she enters when finding his or her car and the parking ticket, and we can communicate based on that knowledge. A lot of times that would probably be more effective than shot gun communication aimed at a certain demographic group.

SBT can also be used to anchor certain states to a brand (using NLP-terminology). That is one really good reason not to advertise on the monday morning bus, unless you can provide a strong positive state change through your ad or have some good reason to want to reach people in a blue state.

And perhaps the media business should make their product portfolio segmentation on the same basis – products intended for certain states.

Tagged as: Brand, Business, Communication Trends, Philosophy, Psychology & Strategy, planners, SBT, Technology, Television