“Audience” Is an Abstraction You Should Stop Using
By Jim Pond and Matt Maguy, Co-founders at JXM
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Ask most marketers who they’re targeting, and you’ll get the same answer, delivered with the same confidence: “Our audience.” It shows up in the strategy. It shows up in the media plan. It shows up in the post-mortem, when nobody can quite explain why performance was soft. Nobody questions it. It sounds like a strategic decision has already been made.
Reality check: It hasn’t. Targeting an “audience” isn’t a strategy. It’s a buying definition that too often gets mistaken for one.
Need to Know:
- “Audience” is a legitimate media-buying term. On its own, though, it’s not inherently strategic, even though it’s constantly treated as such.
- A demographic range like “adults 25-54 in our footprint” is an abstraction, not a person. You cannot build a message that moves an abstraction.
- The fix isn’t a new slogan. It’s a strategic discipline: define the existing behavior you need to change, the moment that makes change possible, the actual person likely living it, and the specific action you want them to take.
- Start with the behavior, not the person. Most products are designed to interrupt a pattern (someone anchored to one option who’d benefit from another), and that pattern belongs at the top of the strategy, before any targeting criteria get written.
- Once the behavior and moment are defined, targeting carries more of the weight. Not because creativity matters less. Because it no longer has to manufacture relevance on its own.
When a Buying Definition Becomes a Substitute for Strategy
“Audience” has a real, useful job. It’s how you define a reach pool for buying media, negotiating rates, filling inventory. Nobody’s proposing you retire it from the vocabulary. The trouble starts when that buying definition quietly gets promoted, without anyone actually deciding to do it, into a stand-in for strategy. Once “our audience” has been named, it starts to feel like the strategic work is finished.
It isn’t. An audience tells you who might receive a message. It doesn’t tell you whose behavior is changeable, why now, or what you need them to do next.
Key insight: You cannot write a message that moves “adults 25–54 in our footprint.” You can write one that moves a 34-year-old who just got a promotion and is still banking where her parents put her at sixteen, even though she doesn’t love it. That’s the difference between a campaign that performs and one that just runs.
The Murky Bucket
Here’s what tends to happen inside marketing departments when a campaign underperforms. Because the day-to-day of the work often gets reduced to an image and a headline, the instinct is to go back to them. What’s going to resonate? What’s going to stop the scroll? It’s an understandable instinct, and it’s usually the wrong question, for a simple reason: you’re never going to know, with any precision, what a demographic “bucket” finds resonant. There’s a lot going on inside that murky bucket.
What resonates with one person may actively alienate another. Show a family to someone who doesn’t have one, or want one, and they don’t just fail to convert. They don’t see themselves in the ad at all, which means the message never even took off, let alone landed.
Key insight: The impulse to fix this by working harder on the creative is the trap. Usually, the creative isn’t the problem. The problem is that the creative got built once and then was served to everyone, instead of being built for the right someone.
Shift to Behavior, Not Audience
Here’s the reordering, and it’s a small one with a large effect: Stop starting with the people you want to reach and start with the behavior you want to change.
Most financial products enter someone’s consideration because something has changed, not because they want a new type of account. Nobody wakes up one morning and decides they need a checking account. Nobody feels a sudden, spontaneous urge for a savings account. What happens is they need a new car, or they get a raise and want to do something useful with it, or a rate somewhere else caught their eye. Their default behavior, in almost every case, is to stay exactly where they already bank, because that’s the path of least resistance. That existing relationship, however dormant or unexamined, is the behavior you’re competing against.
So, the strategy shouldn’t start with “here is everything we want in these people.” It should start with one sentence: they’re currently doing X, and we need them doing Y. A 34-year-old is currently banking on autopilot at the institution her parents chose for her. We need her to actively choose us instead. That sentence- the existing behavior and the desired action, not the demographic- is what belongs at the top of the strategy. Before targeting criteria. Before creative direction. Before channel selection.
Key insight: Once you know the behavior you’re trying to change, you can work backward: who’s most likely living it, what moment makes them receptive, what would move them. That’s a completely different exercise than starting with a pre-baked persona and hoping a behavior falls out of it.
You’ll see this everywhere once you start looking for it. A rate-sensitive product isn’t competing for attention against every other ad in someone’s feed; it’s competing against inertia at their current institution. The message doesn’t need to convince anyone the product category is good. It needs to interrupt a pattern already running on autopilot, at the exact moment someone is primed to reconsider it.
Four Things to Consider Instead of an Audience
We start with four considerations, in a fixed order. None of them are complicated. They just need closer examination:
- Existing behavior. What they’re doing today: where their money already sits, out of habit or inertia, not preference.
- Catalytic moment. What’s happening in their life right now that makes them receptive to a message they’d have ignored a month ago. Behavior doesn’t change in a vacuum. It changes at inflection points.
- An actual person. Not a demographic range, an actual human with a situation. Not “adults 25–54,” but someone with a concrete circumstance: a promotion, a move, a rate that just reset, a life event that put money in motion.
- Desired action. The single, specific thing you need them to do differently. Not “increase awareness.” Not “drive engagement.” The actual action, defined narrowly enough to measure.
Write those four things down for a campaign, and the brief gets shorter and more useful. You stop trying to satisfy a demographic profile with generic reassurance and start writing to move one real decision.
That’s also where measurement gets honest. “Did we reach our audience?” is a media metric, not a business outcome. You can hit every impression goal against a demographic and still not move a single account. “Did the person in that specific moment take the specific action we defined?” is a business outcome. And it’s answerable.
A “Before and After” Example
Conventional strategy:
- Audience: Adults 25–54 in our footprint.
- Objective: Increase awareness of checking.
- Message task: Showcase our slogan “Banking made better.”
Behavior-first strategy:
- Existing behavior: Keeps her direct deposit at the bank her parents chose, because switching feels like a hassle she hasn’t gotten around to.
- Catalytic moment: Just got a big promotion and is reconsidering how she manages the extra income.
- Actual person: A mid-career professional whose financial life has outgrown the account she’s had since she was sixteen.
- Desired action: Open a checking account and move direct deposit within 30 days.
- Message task: Make staying put feel like the less rational choice.
- Measurement: Funded accounts with completed direct-deposit migration, not impressions, not clicks.
What Precision Targeting Frees Creative to Do
Here’s the uncomfortable part of how a lot of financial marketing departments allocate their effort: when the behavior and moment are well defined, creative doesn’t have to work as hard to manufacture relevance. It gets to spend its energy expressing relevance that’s already there.
That runs counter to the instinct of a lot of in-house teams, who, often because their day-to-day toolkit is built around imagery, headlines, and organic social growth goals, default to believing the creative needs to be more arresting, more scroll-stopping, more unlike a bank ad. Sometimes that instinct is right. More often it’s aimed at the wrong problem. If the targeting has correctly identified someone in the right moment with the right behavior to interrupt, that person is a lot more likely to receive and process the message. You need far fewer tricks to earn their attention, because relevance is already doing work before a single word of copy gets written.
Key insight: This doesn’t make creativity less important. It gives creativity the constraints it needs to do a more precise job. Instead of manufacturing interest out of nothing, it addresses the specific friction that keeps someone anchored to their current behavior. Two implications follow from this, and both belong on the strategy before creative direction does.
Behavior Has to Be Followed Across Channels
Behavior-first strategy rarely maps neatly to a single channel. A person may reveal intent through search, encounter the idea again through social or video, return through retargeting, and convert only after several interactions. The answer isn’t to add channels for the sake of a bigger media plan. It’s to give each channel a specific job in moving someone from their existing behavior toward the desired action.
That’s where this work gets operationally difficult. You have to figure out which signals indicate the catalytic moment, where those signals can be reached, what message belongs at each stage, how the channels reinforce each other, and which actions prove the behavior changed. A media list can’t answer those questions. An integrated growth strategy can.
Targeting depth works the same way. It comes from combining meaningful signals against the behavior you’ve defined, not from picking one demographic filter and calling it targeting. Which signals matter and how they are weighted differ for every institution, every product, and every moment. That’s exactly why it doesn’t reduce to a checklist, and why it’s genuinely one of the harder disciplines to teach.
Bottom line: “Audience” survives in financial marketing because it’s safe and comfortable. It lets a strategy sound decisive without requiring anyone to make an actual decision. That comfort is exactly the problem. A demographic range doesn’t respond to messaging, doesn’t have a moment, doesn’t have a behavior to interrupt. Only a person does.
None of that means striking the word from your vocabulary. Say “audience” in the elevator, in the media plan, wherever it’s shorthand for a buying decision. That’s a legitimate use of the term. What it means is refusing to let the word end the strategic conversation before it starts.
Fixing that just takes reordering four questions that most departments already ask, in the wrong sequence: start with the existing behavior you need to change, find the catalytic moment that makes someone receptive to changing it, name the actual person most likely to be standing in that moment, define the desired action precisely enough to measure. Do that consistently, and targeting and creative stop competing for credit and start doing the specific job each is good at.
The institutions that make this shift won’t necessarily run flashier campaigns. They’ll run campaigns that a real person, in a real moment, recognizes themselves in. That’s a lower bar to describe and a much higher one to hit. Which is exactly why so few competitors are doing it.
