Rocket XL went online in a surgical strike to change the conversation around Tim Burton’s film 9.

In the digiverse, harnessing in-depth user data and passion points within social groups is providing media with more surgical methods of capturing the attention of the right group - and a reality check on who you're actually connecting with

Online social media networks are doing for advertisers what behavioural targeting tactics did for SEM: making it increasingly easier to carve out niche audiences based on people's online behaviour.
Facebook, MySpace and Twitter networks allow targeting based on specific information as opposed to data on groups defined by broad demographics. User-input info includes location, keywords, relationship status, age, education, interests, gender, workplace and languages, and social networks with more distinct purposes can provide advertisers with even more in-depth user-supplied data to inform precise messaging match-ups.
Speaking of ideal hook-ups, online dating sites, such as Vancouver-based Plenty of Fish (POF), are potential goldmines for data points based on even more extensive intel provided by daters when they sign up in search of that perfect match. Since starting just over seven years ago, the free-to-join dating destination has risen through the ranks to become one of the top hook-up sites in Canada and Great Britain, and the number-one dating dotcom in the U.S.
It boasts more than 2.1 billion page views, 90 million visitors, a 15% turnover of new visits per month and 2.4 million members in Canada alone. That translates into a database chock-full of valuable user information stemming from data like age, hair colour, location, interests, favourite film genre and, in the case of POF, even the results of a psych test.
"Social media has given consumers a reason to input really rich data points that we can now target based on. That's really what the game-changer was," says Nick Barbuto, director of interactive solutions for Cossette.
"You think about Hotmail or Yahoo in the early days," he says. "Sure, they had a ton of people and they had some social elements to them, but they never gave users a real reason to say that my favourite TV show was Lost or my favourite kind of vacuum is a Dyson. Even if they did give you that opportunity, there wasn't really much of a reason for you to be accurate about that."
Barbuto says that Cossette has worked with POF and paid sites like Lavalife based on the insights gleaned from their user bases.
The agency used Lavalife to target based on demographic info, as well as activities and hobbies for Durolane, a hip and knee pain medication. If a Lavalife member indicated that they were into dancing, they were served with Durolane creative executions speaking to hip and knee pain resulting from dancing. Brands like Bell and Malibu Rum have similarly used POF's targeting abilities to run campaigns based on particular information like profession and drinking habits.
At the end of last year, POF further opened up its database with a self-serve ad platform that lets marketers hyper-target based on sets of extremely specific criteria that come out of the multiple data points it collects from its users. POF partners can use a demographic search tool to determine a breakdown of the site's 100 data points and target ads accordingly, confident that they have a very clear idea of exactly who they will reach.
For example, an advertiser could place an ad intending to reach shy women between the ages of 25 and 34 who are small business owners living in Vancouver.
"‘Do you like crossword puzzles?' is one of our psychology test questions - we can tell if you're shy or not, and that has a dramatic impact on what you will buy and what kind of person you are," says Plenty of Fish CEO Markus Frind. "The more data we give to advertisers, the more targeted they can make their message, or they can exclude people that will never buy their product or service."
So far, the self-serve ad platform has been a success. Since its inception, POF has seen its CPMs per IAB unit more than double. The site is working to make its hyper-targeting offering even more attractive to potential partners by working with brands to track, test and then tweak sets of creative based on their resonance with particular demographic groups.
"Rather than doing focus groups we can really sit there and say ‘Here's the demographic breakdown of who's engaged with your ad,'" says POF VP Kim Kaplan. "They might want to be targeting single mothers over 40, but three of their creative [executions] are really only engaging users under 30."
Though social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter might not be able to offer advertisers access to a large database of dependable data points like POF's, they allow advertisers to go after many niche social groups with a propensity to engage with a particular promotion based on more qualitative aspects.