A Socio-economic Approach to Ad Placement and Color

We’ve discussed ad placement and color strategies in general terms before. This post offers tips on ad placement and color based on your audience’s socio-economic demographic, specifically the social “class” they most strongly identify with. First, a little background…

While it certainly helps to share your audience’s enthusiasms—a stock car racing enthusiast, for example, knows how to speak to other stock car racing enthusiasts in their own language—it’s also important to step back and try to get a more objective, dispassionate feel for who your users are on a fundamental level.

Head of the Class
Chief among the subjects considered taboo in America is socio-economic class. We like to think of our highly mobile society as either class-free or enjoying a class system based solely upon hard-won personal wealth and achievement.

Savvy marketers know otherwise. They have found that a person’s social class is reflected in an array of signals, including speech patterns, clothing, hair styles, product preferences and so forth. Smart marketers and publishers know how to use those signals to make an impression on the audience they are trying to reach. They know that fans of stock car racing tend to respond to a different set of signals than do, say, opera enthusiasts.

Vive la Différence
If you were an advertiser, you wouldn’t try to lure stock car racing fans using images from Wagner’s Tannhäuser any more than you would try to hawk light beer and buffalo wings to opera-goers. That’s not a value judgment, but rather just one of the many observations that marketers and publishers use to market their brands better.

Class Clues You Can Use
Understanding your target audience’s socio-economic class and aspirations can help you make decisions about your content, your editorial voice, and the look and feel of your site.

Luckily, with contextual advertising your ads are likely to match your up pretty well with your site’s content. But you still have to make decisions about what your ads should look like and where on your pages you should place them. Understanding your audience’s socio-economic class can help inform those decisions.

Location by Vocation
If your site deals with, say, rare, first-folio manuscripts, the latest yachting news or classical music, you may want to consider confining your ads to the margins, or placing them between discrete blocks of body copy. If, on the other hand, your site sports news from the monster truck rally or demolition derby circuit, it’s OK to be more aggressive with your ad placement.

To illustrate, look at how ads are typically displayed at a monster truck rally: They appear on just about every printable surface. Now compare that to the more discreetly placed advertising you’re likely to find at a corporate-sponsored cultural event such a classical music concert or a wine tasting. You get the idea.

Note that it’s important that you not plaster your interface with ads to the point that your content is hidden, and there should always be a clear delineation between your editorial and our ads, as noted in our guidelines.

Color Me Class-Conscious
Use the same basic guidelines for color: Though you have many choices, in general you’ll want to choose muted colors for the vintage-wine-and-cheese crowd. For the lager-and-beef-jerky set, however, a somewhat more colorful approach may be called for. In either case, it’s a general best practice to choose ad colors that are complimentary to the overall color scheme of your site. (With Yahoo! Publisher Network, you’ve got some 4,294,967,296, possible color combinations to choose from). Remember, no matter what colors you choose, clean design almost always works best.

In terms of people’s page-viewing habits, eye tracking applies pretty much across all demographics. The options for ad placement are myriad and we offer ad layouts to fit most page designs. In addition, a mix of display and contextual ads tends to work best in almost all cases.

For more detail on how socio-economic class works and how taste is determined, here are some good books on the topic:

Class: A Guide through the American Status System, by Paul Fussell
Snobbery: The American Version, by Joseph Epstein
Taste: Acquiring What Money Can’t Buy, by Letitia Baldrige

—Michael Mattis, Blogster-in-Chief