Who are these "Women 18-54" anyway?

I spent 20 years of my life in what is broadly known as "International". First, with DMB&B, opening their Latin American network and later, with FCB first in Latin America and then 5 years as EVP and International Media Director.

One of the true pleasures of working in international, apart from meeting people from all over the world, is targetting.

Since the introduction of people meters... and many Latin American countries had them way before the United States, the only time we ever spoke about "women 18-54" or something like that, was when our U.S. counterparts came to meetings.

You see, in most countries, we can target much narrower. For example, we could target "Women, 25-35, in the AB and C+ Socio-economic levels"

So I was both, amazed and thrilled that the U.S. might be moving in that direction.

Not the same woman at all.

This makes all of the sense in the world. An 18-year old girl has nothing in common with a 40 year old woman. First, the girl is basically still in college and/or working at her first job. She doesn't have any hard and fast habits and might even live at home. A 40 year old woman is the CEO of her home, has hard-to-break habits and thinks much differently.

The old media paradigm.

Naturally, when we were limited to "only broadcast" it was hard to really use the information effectively. Television is a wide wide net which just about got everyone.

When cable became a factor, targetting was much easier, though a lot of clients, either out of budget concerns or out of habit, did not want to take the obvious next step: custom-made creative (or at least, adaptations from the general spots) that would appeal to a narrowly defined target or even a cable channel audience.

For example, if you are an MTV fan, do you really think that a spot intended to sway an ESPN fan would work as well?

For obvious reasons, radio was always easier to segment that way --creative and production being so cheap-- and that's one of the reasons I like radio.

The new media possibilities

Today, of course, there's no excuse. Interactive, be it search, display, mobile or any other platform, should be customized to fit the target. Actually, it should probably be customized to fit the specific target in the specific site.

But the same thinking should be applied across the board.

Television, radio, web, mobile... we need to start thinking about micro-targetting, micro-creative and implementing serious tracking to see what combination works best.