Targeting the Movable Middles can:
Yield 9.5x the number of conversions when compared to traditional broad reach tactics
Save marketers more than 50% to achieve the same business outcomes as other targeting tactics
Produce dramatically higher advertising returns, up to 23x
New research from TransUnion and MMA Global shows that Movable Middles outperform other popular approaches for driving short-term sales and acquiring customers over time. The Movable Middles are open-minded consumers defined by their mid-range probability of buying the brand.
As illustrated in the study, Ally Bank achieved 2.2x (120% increase) in short term account openings compared to category buyer audiences and 1.9x (90% increase) in long term customer acquisitions by targeting their Moveable Middles.
Kevin Howard, Executive Director of Growth Marketing and Innovation, Ally Financial, said, “Marketing budgets are finite and precious, and we don’t want to waste any of it on consumers who won’t engage or respond to advertising. Analyzing our existing set up across campaigns, audience targets, placement tactics, and creative helped us find areas of higher concentrated Movable Middles.
“Then we could adjust and optimize our budget on those consumers who would pay attention and act, which drove significant new account openings and overall customer growth for us in a crowded category,” Howard said.
The findings are unveiled in a new whitepaper, Breakthroughs in Audience Strategy: Debunking the Short- and Long-Term Myth of Marketing. This is the latest data to come out of a multi-year research partnership between TransUnion and MMA Global. In 2021, the partnership first produced research on the Movable Middles as an audience targeting strategy to optimize budget performance.
Vas Bakopoulos, SVP, Head of Industry Research at MMA Global, said, “We partnered with TransUnion to give marketers empirical tools to improve their marketing effectiveness. In our latest publication with TransUnion, we’ve quantified the impact of targeting Movable Middles and given CMOs a roadmap to replicate the success we’ve seen across all the brands who have used this approach.”
Michael Schoen, EVP and head of TruAudience marketing solutions at TransUnion, said, “Though it might seem counterintuitive, we knew from our previous research that marketers leveraging the Movable Middles approach realize significant short-term gains. We now know that these Movable Middles drive growth in the long term as well.
“Now we have a validated system to operationalize these insights and we look forward to working with more brands to identify, reach, and measure the effectiveness of targeting their Movable Middles,” Schoen said.
Methodology: Built upon the framework in the previous paper, TransUnion and MMA Global embarked on a study with Ally Bank, which ran a 10-week campaign targeted at audiences rich in Ally’s Movable Middles. Using TransUnion’s TruAudience identity graph to track conversions across 18-months post-campaign, the Movable Middles audiences achieved over 2x return on ad spend and 2x customer growth compared to broad reach tactics in both the short and long terms.
