Nerd Alert: Why Your Hyper-Targeted Ads Might Be a Waste
from The Marketing Architects
by Marketing Architects
Published: Thu Aug 07 2025
Show Notes
Welcome to Nerd Alert, a series of special episodes bridging the gap between marketing academia and practitioners. We’re breaking down highly involved, complex research into plain language and takeaways any marketer can use.
In this episode, Elena and Rob reveal how third-party audience targeting often delivers worse accuracy than random guessing, with demographic targeting hitting the right audience only 24.4% of the time compared to 26.5% accuracy from random targeting.
Topics covered:
To learn more, visit marketingarchitects.com/podcast or subscribe to our newsletter at marketingarchitects.com/newsletter.
Resources:
Lambrecht, A., Tucker, C., & Wiertz, C. (2019).How effective is third-party consumer profiling and audience delivery? Evidence from field studies. Marketing Science Institute Working Paper Series, 19-105.
Get more research-backed marketing strategies by subscribing to The Marketing Architects on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
In this episode, Elena and Rob reveal how third-party audience targeting often delivers worse accuracy than random guessing, with demographic targeting hitting the right audience only 24.4% of the time compared to 26.5% accuracy from random targeting.
Topics covered:
- []"How Effective is Third Party Consumer Profiling and Audience Delivery"
- []The difference between first-party and third-party data
- []Study results: 59% accuracy sounds good until you learn random targeting hits 26.5%
- []Raw data accuracy drops to worse than random at 24.4%
- []Interest-based targeting performs better than demographic targeting
- []Third-party audiences are "economically unattractive"
To learn more, visit marketingarchitects.com/podcast or subscribe to our newsletter at marketingarchitects.com/newsletter.
Resources:
Lambrecht, A., Tucker, C., & Wiertz, C. (2019).How effective is third-party consumer profiling and audience delivery? Evidence from field studies. Marketing Science Institute Working Paper Series, 19-105.
Get more research-backed marketing strategies by subscribing to The Marketing Architects on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.