Tailored Advertising

Marketing and advertising campaigns that place emphasis on the needs and wants of a small sets of people or on an individual consumer, as opposed to targeting a mass audience. Tailored advertising may involve providing a coupon for a specific type of good or service based on the past purchases, using demographic information to present an advertising message to a particular market segment, or running a campaign designed for a specific city or metro area. Because it is more specialized, tailored advertising tends to be more expensive to develop than mass-market advertising.

Tailored advertising has become a more common technique with the advent of the internet, since companies are able to track individual consumer behavior more readily. For example, a consumer buys milk at a grocery store where he is a member of that store's loyalty program. The loyalty program collects information on that consumer's shopping habits and is able to compare what this consumer purchases with what others purchase. The information it aggregates suggests that most consumers buying milk also buy bread. At the checkout, the store may print out a coupon for 10% off the price of bread.