From Guesses to Personas : The Potential of Automatic Persona Generation (APG) in Targeting Digital Advertising Messages
Ilkka Kaate · UTUPub (University of Turku) · 2020
The role of precisely targeted marketing has grown strongly with the rise of new media such as social media. It is possible to control in digital channels to whom one wants to show advertise- ments but creating the initial targeting parameters and marketing message can be difficult if one is not sure about the target audience. APG, standing for automatic persona generation, enables the usage of existing digital data in persona creation process. With this technique it is possible to reveal fast and precisely up- to-date information of a company’s target audience with accompanied attribute information. Creating marketing message for people-like personas has been shown a powerful method for communicating information on company’s offering. Each company has digital data on their customers gathered one way or another. Data used in this research consists of data gathered by a company called Elämyslahjat during the years on its website users. These data were used to develop personas and lists of characteristics with APG effectiveness of which was then again tested by recruiting thirty marketing professionals to write ads based on these personas and lists of characteristics to Facebook. After this the effectiveness of ads written for personas and for lists of characteristics were compared. The results show that there might be potential for APG to act as a basis for more effective marketing due to its speed in persona creation and preciseness. There were differences between mean click-through-rates (CTR) of ads written for personas and for lists of characteristics. APG shows also potential with its speed to mold data into more understandable form as personas quite rapidly for the purposes of advertising and marketing. This enables the usage of precise target audiences which is a desirable in marketing. The research shows that there is potential for persona-based advertisements as a marketing boosting element in digital environments. This has business-wise significance while it saves time and improves the efficiency of work done in ads creation.