AlwaysOn has a commentary by online marketing guru David Carlick. Among his predictions:
Populations will replace demographics.
It isnt about the long tail; its about the small population: Everyone lies within the center of a bell curve, and the trick is placing them in small populations where theyre at the center. (Targeting!) Online marketers are able to do this in a way that broadcasters and big print cant. (Think of the checkout process at Amazon.) Thanks to computers and software and increasingly intelligent algorithms, we can bucket these small populations with behavioral information so that we can refi ne our relevance and targeting. Demographics, by contrast, are far too clumsy for an openmedia world. Case in point: Something like 30% of the traffi c at the womans site iVillage is made up of men. And demographicsnot psychographics or behavioral targetingwere what led Honda to make the delightfully successful mistake of introducing the Element as a youth car only to have it snapped up by geezers who loved its practicality.
