Brand and Targeted Advertising: Interaction Opportunities and Barriers

Today companies are striving to ensure the presence of the brand on the Internet. Because of its advantages, they choose to communicate with customers via targeted advertising. Researchers describe the various possibilities of targeted advertising, but it remains unclear how these opportunities are evaluated by brands in terms of the process of communication with users and of its properties, what tasks are solved via such advertising and what tools they use for, and what obstacles and risks brands feel, using this channel. To solve this problem, we used a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with informants with experience in setting up and launching targeted advertising for different brands. As a result, it was revealed that targeted advertising is represented as a “bridge”, an “intermediate link” or a “contact point” connecting a brand and an audience on the Internet. Moreover, there is a “fine line” in what kind of advertising can actually be called targeted. Communication via targeted advertising is perceived through the availability of technical capabilities in advertising cabinets for delivering product information - targeting for finding the target audience for certain parameters. Creation of a banner, design and text goes by the wayside. Also we described the process of brand communication using targeted advertising and identified its 18 properties. Actors can correlate audience search technology or format with what purpose (performance or branding) they would use them for, but they admit that they hardly thought about it when setting up. Informants think about the tasks of advertising in the framework of brandformance. Actors feel that the risks of brands representatives and representatives of agencies and freelancers are different, which affects their behavior strategies. They also identified the internal and external barriers that brands face when communicating with the audience through targeted advertising.