Targeting or Over-Targeting? – The New Marketing Dilemma

The Variety Entertainment Marketing Summit was held in Los Angeles on April 24, where the industry’s top leaders exchanged ideas on the latest trends, challenges, and opportunities in digital advertising. The main lesson of the event: today’s marketers must simultaneously reach a broad audience and connect with each consumer personally – otherwise, they can easily get lost in the media noise.

During the panel discussions, executives from Disney, Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, TikTok, Google, Sephora, NASCAR, and Netflix shared their experiences. Josh Mattison, VP of Digital Operations at Disney Advertising, provided some sobering numbers: 4-5 billion ad impressions are served per week across Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN alone, and 50,000 different creatives are delivered to Disney’s system each month.

A central theme in the discussions was that in a world of algorithms and personalized advertising, over-targeting can easily lead to market narrowing. As Gayle Troberman, marketing consultant at iHeartMedia, put it succinctly:

“We’re killing ourselves with targeting. We need to reach more people, not fewer.”

Warner Bros. cited the Minecraft movie as an example, where they brought in the most well-known Minecraft content creators during the development phase—not as an afterthought, but as organic co-creators.