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Middle America butters your bread.

Well, it turns out that the advertising-driven internet industry is supported principally by the Middle-American be-slippered homemaker, according to MediaPost. Does this come as a surprise to anyone? As Mathew Ingram points out, anyone with a level of technological sophistication differentiates between ads and content and clicks appropriately.

The implication identified by MediaPost is that clicks should not drive campaign design:

Focusing campaigns to optimize on clicks means skewing campaigns to optimize on middle-aged women from the Midwest. If these folks are not your target, then you should be ignoring the click-rate and looking deeper… [from MediaPost]

Fair point - but seems like a generalization. If you’re a snowboard manufacturer, advertising snowboards on a snowboarding website, would click-throughs still not be one valid metric of ad design? I think the message isn’t necessarily that click-throughs are useless as a performance metric, but that campaigns need to be designed with a clear action/response goal in mind.

Danah Boyd continues the discussion, adding some ethical hand-wringing to the equation, asking:

If my hypothesis were true, what would it mean if marketing is profiting primarily off of those who are economically and socially struggling? How do we feel about this philosophically, ethically, and professionally? Would we feel proud of living off of a business model that targets the poor? [from danah boyd]

Well - marketing to the poor and uneducated is far from a novel strategy, and web-moguls are far from the first to get rich on that basis. Consider fast food, the snack industry, etc. etc. Who eats Hostess Twinkies anyway?

To me the implication of the research is nothing more than a reaffirmation of the importance of marketing strategy - segment your market, pick your target segments, and design campaigns for them.

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