Instagram targeting

Instagram is really good at what I call “one dimensional psychographic targeting”.

Essentially, based on the photos and videos (more likely hashtags) that you see, spend time on, like and comment, the platform figures out some of your interests and targets at you advertisements of products that serve these interests. And instagram manages to combine this with demographic information (where you live, etc.) to target advertisements better at you.

For example, of late I’ve been looking at a lot of weightlifting stuff on Instagram – I follow most of the coaches at my gym, and a few other handles that post fitness stuff. I’ve even posted a video of myself deadlifting.

As a result, Instagram has been following me with advertisements related to fitness, and the combination with demographics means I’m being served stuff I can get in Bangalore. For example, last two days I’ve been seeing ads of my own gym (!!). There are ads for whey proteins and healthy foods of all kinds as well.

This targeting is not perfect – for the last few months, ever since I returned to India, I’ve been bombarded on Instagram with advertisements asking me to emigrate to Canada (I don’t know what makes it think I want to move abroad again given I’ve just moved back home). The seemingly un-targeted mattress advertisements are everywhere. The shirt advertisements as well (though recently I uploaded a picture of my wardrobe on Instagram).

Nevertheless, this is a massive step up from what marketers were able to do a generation ago, where they could at best target based on a demographic. Marketers might have created elaborate psychographic or behavioural profiles of their target audiences, but when it came to advertising, the media available (newspaper, television and outdoors) meant that they had to collapse it into a demographic profile.

Instagram is not perfect, though. To the best of my knowledge, it can only target me on one “psychographic dimension” (“interested in weight lifting”, “interested in coloured chinos”, “likes Bangalore”) along with a multitude of demographic dimensions (I’m sure it’s figured out my gender, age group and maybe even caste, even if it exists in some vector somewhere and no human knows these classifications).

However, when you have created elaborate psychographic profiles, collapsing them into one dimension is still a simplification process. And so you get a reasonable degree of error in targeting. So I’m wondering what can be done that can enable advertisers to target me with more specific products that I might be interested in.

Finally, really how much are the likes of Charles Tyrwhitt, and some mattress brand whose name I don’t recall, willing to pay for their campaigns, given that their untargeted campaigns have beaten the highly targeted campaigns of the fitness guys and coffee companies to reach my eyeballs?

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