Interest Nomads: Why Historical Data Describes Yesterday's Audience

"You aren't advertising to a standing army, you are advertising to a MOVING PARADE." (widely attributed to David Ogilvy)

Growth happens when advertising continuously reaches new people, rather than repeatedly addressing the same contacts. Markets – and above all their participants – are not static.

Dynamism, however, does not mean arbitrariness. It starts with a pragmatic question: who actually counts as relevant reach?

How many people in the total population belong to the target group of a given product category?

Which people will become relevant as new category entrants in the future?

How many potential buyers are currently in adjacent or related categories?

The goal is not to artificially narrow broad reach. But it helps to avoid wasted spend on people who have no realistic purchase potential at all. This is precisely what people are best positioned to assess through self-determination – particularly through the conscious act of not selecting in a given moment: an exclusion logic scalably delegated to millions of individuals.

Consumers continuously enter and exit buying cycles – which is why, alongside reaching the right people, the right timing of ad delivery is equally decisive.

People are interest nomads. The individuality and dynamism of human behavior cannot be reliably predicted through historical data. And it is even harder to determine, on the basis of data alone, which phase of the buying cycle millions of individual people are currently in.

It becomes reliable when people decide for themselves what is relevant to them right now.

That is what makes Choice-Driven Advertising so scalable – particularly when it comes to continuously reaching dynamic audiences.

Many thanks to Diego Chicharro 🦡 (Founder of Unfair Edge)