Targeting by personality. One-to-one marketing isn't just possible - it's essential. Send the right message.

1. Get set for programmatic 2.0:
targeting by personality
One-to-one marketing isn’t just possible - it’s essential.
It’s time to start sending the right messages

2. You have a fraction of a second to capture your audience’s
attention. How do you do it?
The answer lies in appealing directly to individual personalities
using tailored messages. If you don’t understand what makes
each member of your target audience tick, you can’t hope to
truly engage them and make an emotional connection. And
without that connection, your use of programmatic approaches
will never reach its full potential.
The good news is that the next generation of programmatic is
here. Armed with the right demographic, online behavioural and
psychographic data, you can get the deep insights you need to
drive more value and efficiency from programmatic approaches
to advertising. The latest technology makes it easier to really
connect with individuals by tailoring creative messages to
appeal directly to their personality type. And putting the right
message in front of the right eyeballs at the right moment will
translate into unprecedented ROI.
This paper explores how programmatic innovation is creating a
new culture of creative based on individual personalities. Early
adopters are using programmatic 2.0 to deliver compelling,
individually-tailored messages that resonate more effectively
with each person—at lightning speed and at massive scale. Can
you afford to get left behind?
Executive
Summary

3. Get set for programmatic 2.0:
targeting by personality
Blink and
you’ll miss it
The way we consume content is changing. Screen stacking,
once the domain of younger Millennials, is fast becoming
the norm for adults worldwide. Attention spans are shorter,
impressions more fleeting. And in the brave new world of
programmatic advertising, laser-targeted, data-driven bids for
your audience’s attention are won and lost in a fraction of a
second.
As programmatic is growing from an exciting concept into a
fast-evolving set of cost-effective marketing technologies,
brands and buyers have gained the potential to reach
audiences at unprecedented speed and scale.
Insatiable appetites for content on digital platforms have
created rich contextual data about where your audiences live,
work, shop and eat. First-generation programmatic combined
this behavioural data with demographic information on age,
gender, income and brand preferences, and sliced up the
digital inventory into saleable segments.
Statistical analysis of first-generation programmatic
campaigns has revealed some interesting trends. For
example, a recent study has shown that programmatic
adverts in the travel and leisure sector achieved higher
conversion if they mentioned a price or a special offer, while
in the financial services sector featuring a special offer in a
programmatic advert actually made conversion less likely. 1
These analyses offer glimpses into what members of the
audience like, but not who they are. This first-generation
approach creates a potentially dangerous sense of false
security. It may feel as though you know your customers, but
that knowledge is superficial. This is because programmatic
audiences are made up of individuals with very different
personality types, and each will respond to your messages
differently based on their own unique traits—even if they
appear to be exactly the same demographically. To truly
understand what drives a prospect to purchase, we need to
look deeper.
1. The definitive guide to creative optimization, Rocket Fuel, http://rocketfuel.com/blog/creative-guide
Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in
a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are
writing to each of them a letter on behalf of your client.
David Ogilvy

4. Get set for programmatic 2.0:
targeting by personality
Sending the right
message
Today’s digital audiences decide if they like what they see
in the blink of an eye. But what is it that motivates them
in the split second that they see your advert? Without
understanding what drives each person to convert, and
the ability to bring that insight to your creative, your
programmatic strategy will never attain its full commercial
potential.
Research has shown that people react most favourably to
messages that align with their unique personality types,
which can be measured using psychological profiling
techniques. For more than 30 years, academics have applied
the OCEAN big-five model to measure and describe unique
personalities, based on five core personality dimensions:
Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness
and Neuroticism.
When it comes to connecting with your audience, it’s
emotionally intelligent creative that makes the magic
happen—and the OCEAN model offers a powerful way
to identify messages that will resonate with individual
members of your audience. Gaining the necessary insight
into personalities does not require big data; it requires
smart data. Programmatic 2.0 combines demographic and
online behavioural information with the missing piece:
psychographic data.
Let’s take an example. Recently, VisualDNA tested the
effectiveness of a high-octane, 30-second video advert
in driving audience engagement. Before a screening to a
focus group, each member of the audience took one of
VisualDNA’s online personality tests. By applying advanced
psychometric models based on more than 50 million
previous test respondents, VisualDNA determined whether
each member of the audience was more likely to be
extroverted or introverted.
Next, VisualDNA screened the advert to each member of
the group. Working together with Realeyes—a company
that offers real-time emotional measurements via webcam
feeds—VisualDNA captured each viewer’s emotional
engagement at every second of the video.
The results could hardly be clearer; the video advert was
vastly more popular with members of the audience that
VisualDNA identified as high extraverts. In fact, audience
members with high and low extraversion had opposite
reactions in their engagement with the video—the
extraverts loved it, but the introverts hated it. This raises
an important question: how many first-generation
programmatic campaigns are pushing away large proportions
of their audience without even realizing it?

5. Get set for programmatic 2.0:
targeting by personality
VisualDNA believes that the key to insight is not
simply seeking more data, but instead using the
science of psychology to reveal behavioural traits and
buying propensity. This is the heart of programmatic
2.0: combining psychology and big data to provide
actionable insight into who your customers are, why
they behave the way they do and which messages they
will find most compelling.
In focus-group contexts, the OCEAN big-five personality
types—Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion,
Agreeableness and Neuroticism—are the primary
colours of psychometric profiling. By mixing from this
palette, profilers can create vivid market segments
based on individual responses. As digital gains ground,
the challenge is increasingly to obtain the deep
insights of a focus group at the speed and scale of
programmatic.
VisualDNA utilizes a set of internationally recognised
models and psychographic principles to measure
individual personality types of digital audiences
rapidly, accurately and cost-effectively. Developed in
close collaboration with leading psychology research
departments at Cambridge University, University
College London and the University of Kent, VisualDNA
empowers brands, agencies and publishers to do more
than simply define their audience for programmatic
campaigns—it enables them to proactively build and
deliver tailored messages that speak to each prospect’s
unique personality.
The science is sound, and the commercial benefits are
proven. VisualDNA is already helping businesses to drive
more accurate and granular segmentation, create more
targeted and relevant advertising and ensure more
effective use of advertising and marketing spend.
Getting started is simple. VisualDNA data is hosted in
a comprehensive range of DSP and DMAP platforms
for display, video and mobile advertising, and the
technology enables both search advertising and
CRM. This makes A/B and multivariate testing and
optimisation simple, helping brands, agencies and
publishers to put insight into action rapidly.
What is
programmatic 2.0?
What really decides consumers to
buy or not to buy is the content of
your advertising, not its form.
David Ogilvy

6. Get set for programmatic 2.0:
targeting by personality
According to a study by PaperG and Digiday Content
Studio, 62 percent of marketeers are already using software
to create and deliver multiple versions of ads—a clear
example of how CMOs see big data and new technologies as
opportunities to customize creative and deliver compelling
messages to the right people in real time.2
Another recent example shows why brands have been
so quick on the uptake. In 2014, VisualDNA worked with
a leading health and beauty brand to demonstrate the
commercial power of dynamic creative targeting. The brand
purchased 15 million programmatic impressions from its
core target audience. Rather than simply sending the same
creative to all recipients—the first-generation programmatic
approach—VisualDNA helped the brand to segment its
audience into people with high openness, high extraversion,
low openness and low extraversion.
Each segment received tailored creative. Because people
with high openness are generally more willing to take risks
and experiment, the brand sent them a bold, confronting
message: “Give two fingers to convention”. At the other
end of the spectrum, members of the audience identified
as having low extraversion received a softer sell: “Beauty
doesn’t have to shout.”
By matching the right creative with the right audience, this
leading brand inspired over 1,000 customers to purchase,
and boosted ROI by a massive 56 percent compared with a
control group.
Attractive figures
2. Creative at lightning pace, PaperG and Digiday Content Studio, http://digiday.com/rcc-paperg-industry-study-can-creative-keep-up-with-programmatic/

7. Get set for programmatic 2.0:
targeting by personality
Programmatic 2.0 has arrived. By combining demographic,
behavioural and psychographic insights, enterprises can market
to personalities, not postcodes. Visionaries in the industry are
now seizing the opportunity to share these personality segments
directly with their creatives, who can build and deliver compelling
content that speaks to each individual part of the target audience.
As programmatic 2.0 gathers pace, dynamic creative
optimisation—based on scientific principles for measuring
personality—will become best practice. Using shared tools,
creative will collaborate with other functions of the business to
monitor the effectiveness of each message in near-real time, and
make rapid adjustments to drive conversion or brand uplift. New
platforms for digital advert development are already emerging,
and the new technologies will foster closer connections between
creative, accounts and analytics functions—encouraging a
virtuous cycle of iterative development.
Smarter scheduling,
sharper messages
As businesses race to enable the new capabilities, first movers
will gain the commercial advantage. However, it is important to
remember that the next generation of programmatic is just the
beginning. Once the new approach becomes widespread, the
brands and buyers that succeed will be the ones that can bring
creative and data closest together.
As David Ogilvy recognized decades ago, it is the content of
your advertising that makes the difference between winning
and losing the attention of your audience. With programmatic
2.0, visionaries in the industry have the opportunity to start
building messages that grab the audience’s attention and don’t
let go.
Take the lead

8. Get set for programmatic 2.0:
targeting by personality
As we have seen, audiences that can be targeted
programmatically are made up of people with different
psychological types and buying motivations. To drive
the best possible results from executing campaigns
programmatically, defining the audience is just the first step.
It is only by linking psychographic data on your audience
with the creative process that enterprises can unlock the full
commercial potential of programmatic advertising—and
VisualDNA is at the forefront of this emerging discipline.
For brands and buyers, there’s never been a better time to
reach out to digital audiences with tailored creative. And by
working together with VisualDNA, it’s also never been easier.
VisualDNA provides all of the core capabilities that drive the
next generation of programmatic advertising—including
solutions that enable you to understand the unique
personalities of your audiences, and solutions that prepare
your technology stack to create, target and measure the
impact of your optimised creative.
VisualDNA is already helping industry leaders to understand
what really motivates the people behind the screens. Used
intelligently—and backed by the right data—programmatic
enables real-time mass campaigns that work at the level
of the individual. These campaigns are better for agencies,
brands and consumers alike, ensuring greater efficiency,
relevance, timeliness and emotional connection in
advertising.
To learn more about targeting by psychological types see our
dynamic infographic at http://big5.visualdna.com.
Start the conversation

9. About
VisualDNA
VisualDNA brings together psychology and
big data to deliver new levels of customer
understanding.
Our vision is to transform the way people are understood online by
providing a new layer of data to the digital ecosystem. Our large team
of data scientists works with our psychologists to harness the largest
psychographic database in the world, plus 30 years of academic
research into human understanding and online behaviour. We provide
rapid and in-depth understanding of who an organisation’s online
customers are and how best to communicate with them.
VisualDNA technology is integrated with all major communication
platforms from Display, Email, CRM and Search to onsite
personalisation, which means online merchants can create optimised
campaigns and customer journeys with minimal implementation effort.
For more information, please visit www.visualdna.com/marketing-services
or call +44 20 7734 7033
Follow us on Twitter @VisualDNA