Cross-Interest Targeting

What Larry Kim calls the inverted unicorn ad targeting method, I call cross-interest targeting. Tomato, tomahto.

It hinges on the idea that you can maximize Facebook relevance scores by not only targeting the right people (e.g. marketers with director titles), but by also layering in completely unrelated interests.

The example Larry uses to illustrate this strategy is “liberals who watch Star Trek Deep Space Nine”. Those are two big audiences, and the trick is to focus on the overlap.

Then, he created a campaign highlighting the dangers of fake news.

What does Star Trek have do with liberals? Nothing.

But it allowed him to target people who would might understand this obscure joke.

“If you have no clue what this joke is all about, that is the beauty of this strategy,” Larry says. “You would have never seen the ad in the first place! It was engineered to appeal specifically to this audience. It worked: the Star-Trek loving liberals engaged with the post, leading to strong engagement metrics and a Facebook Relevance Score of 7/10.”

At Vendasta, our content team tried something similar with Game of Thrones.

We wrote a blog post that played on themes from Game of Thrones (called Game of Agencies) and put together some sweet posters as the lead magnet.

Little did we know at the time, we weren’t the first to do this…

Before the campaign launched, my CEO forwarded me an episode of the SaaStr podcast with Sangram Vajre, Founder & CMO of Terminus.

Sangram’s story is a cautionary tale for cross-interest targeting: