Yesterday, Stephen Baker, author of the book Numerati spoke at Digiday:Target, a conference in New York City about targeting online advertising. As he started off, he was given the challenge to find the individual in the mountain of data. He spoke about how if you put people in enough different buckets and then tried to find people in specific combinations of buckets, you could probably get to the individual. He compared a chain of these buckets to the genome. Each bucket is common with many people in them, but a specific combination of buckets can be used to uniquely identify someone.

For example, if you target fifty year old white males of a specific education and income level in Woodbridge, CT that own a dog, a cat, a hybrid, and have children in gifted education programs, I suspect I may be the only hit, even though there are plenty of dog owners, cat owners, hybrid owners, and so on in Woodbridge.

If you do find an agency that is targeting people in the demographic I just described, have them call me. It is probably something I’m interested in. This illustrates another point about targeting. Mr. Baker suggested that if you talk about targeting people, they will feel invaded, but if you talk about customized service, they feel rich. Anyone trying to hit a demographic as precise as I just described has to be offering a customized service.

For others, this level of targeting could raise some privacy issues. However, this isn’t a level of targeting that most ad agencies are interested in. Mr. Baker noted that there just aren’t enough creatives to do one-on-one advertising to 100 million people.

Yet this is where I think a lot of targeting breaks down. The other day, my seven year old daughter went to a local art museum. She was intrigued by a portrait of a woman that no matter where she stood, the woman looked directly at her. I am sure that the creative that painted that picture wasn’t targeting suburban seven year old girls.

In other sessions, speakers noted that too often false assumptions are made about audiences. Just because someone did a search on “a dark blue 1998 to 2003 Mercedes Benz CLK-320 coupe” doesn’t mean that I have any intention on buying one. I might simply be reading up more about a horrible hit-and-run fatality in New Haven.

Likewise, determining why people purchase products can be fraught with false assumptions. Some people might buy Portuguese wine because it is inexpensive. Others might buy the same wine because they have Portuguese ancestry. Another speaker described the shock that a client had when they were shown pictures of their fans on MySpace. Too often, people may be targeting the wrong demographic.

It reminds me of a great line from the play Travesties by Tom Stoppard. In it, a Dadaist artist has a wonderful line to the effect, “It is the responsibility of the artist to laugh, and jeer, and howl, and belch at the common delusion that infinite generates of causes can be inferred from effects.”

Perhaps creatives at ad agencies need a little more Dadaism in their own work. Instead of targeting fifty year old white males of a specific education and income level in Woodbridge, CT that own a dog, a cat, a hybrid, and have children in gifted education programs, they should target people that want to feel like they are accepted and belong to some group, people that are concerned about the economy, people with complicated emotional ties to their families, people that feel a little self-conscious when someone seems to stare at them from across the room, the way the painting stared at my daughter, or so many other demographics that don’t really narrow things down very much but instead reflect the human condition.

From this, you can get people to feel a personal connection. They might even want to join a discussion others touched by the product or even help an ad go viral.

If we keep focusing more and more on narrowing demographics, we might find the people most likely to be interested in our products, and at the same time, we just may alienate them enough to drive them to our competitors. In the sixties, people had tee shirts that said, I am a human being, do not bend, fold, spindle or mutilate. Perhaps a similar tee shirt today would say something like, I am not a demographic.

(Originally posted at DigiDay.)