Lookalike audience
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
Effective and opaque in equal measure, and available only where a platform has both your seed list and enough signal to model against it, which in practice means the large social platforms. It is worth remembering that a lookalike inherits every bias in the seed: modelling on your existing customers reliably finds more people like your existing customers, which is not the same as finding growth.
What this one connects to
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
First-party data
Data an organisation has collected directly from its own customers and visitors — a CRM list, purchase history, site behaviour. Distinguished from third-party data by the existence of a direct relationship with the person it describes.
Paid social
Advertising inside social platforms, bought against platform-owned interest, demographic and behavioural audiences. The platforms optimise delivery inside their own inventory using signals no third party can see.
Audience segment
A named group of people a seller will let you target, defined by some combination of demographics, behaviour, stated interest or inferred intent, and identified in a buying system by a specific identifier.
More on targeting and identity
How an audience is described to a seller, and how much of the description survives. Most of the honest difficulty in media buying lives here.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience and watch it compile into seven targeting specifications, each with the score for how much of the definition survived.
Talk it through