In a world where finding your significant other could be as easy as swiping ‘left’ or ‘right’, the digital age has unknowingly proliferated the sanctity of your soulmate search.
At the SXSW Interactive Festival (which B&T is currently attending in the US), MullenLowe Profero planning director Jazmin Correa is leading a panel called ‘The Love Algorithm’, exploring how relationship habits are forming marketers’ blueprint for targeting.
Correa said there is now tons of data at marketers’ disposal, “and when we marry the right data together, we can uncover new insights that dimensionalise our consumer in ways we’d never thought of”.
“Targeting by relationship life stage, for example, has typically been done by focusing on macro life-stages – dating, marriage, babies, divorce,” she said.
“Data now allows us gain deeper insight into the nuances within each life-stage, like ‘third daters’, ‘sharing my Netflix account’ or ‘actively cheating’. These insights can help us reach consumers in more insightful and relevant ways.”
Data and lifestyle experts from Honeyfund.com, Inc., Nielsen Catalina Solutions and NCC Media are joining Correa on the panel to discuss how marketers can identify and leverage untapped insights that consumers are creating online based on their relationship statuses.
Sara Margulis, CEO of weding registry Honeyfund.com, Inc., said: “We bring an intimate understanding of online behaviour during engagement, wedding-planning, honeymoon and post-nuptials. Our work with advertisers allows us to offer an incredibly targeted and captive audience, during one of the most intense buying periods of their lives. We see first-hand how relationship-stage targeting is truly a special opportunity for marketers.”
“Edward Kim, vice president of product and strategy at Nielsen Catalina Solutions, said: “We are excited to explore the possibility of measuring the efficacy of a consumer journey based on relationship cycles by enabling advertisers, agencies and media companies to measure return on ad spend across TV, digital, mobile, print, radio and CRM.”
Andrew Capone, senior vice president of marketing and business development at NCC Media, said: “Being happily married for almost 25 years, and a member of the ‘VCR and chill’ generation, I’m uniquely unqualified to speak personally to the efficacy of algorithms in dating. But after 35 years in media, I can certainly speak to the remarkable evolution of marketers’ abilities to target consumers in various stages of life and love, geographically, demographically and behaviorally. And I’ll make the case that context and content still matter most. Does love trump math? This will be a spirited discussion about science versus emotion.”
