By Chris Schembri, Founder & CEO, Aletheia Marketing & Media
Media planning has never had more data, but I’m not convinced we’re asking better questions.
After three decades in media, I’ve watched our industry evolve from broad demographic buying to audience-first activation powered by increasingly sophisticated data. We’ve become remarkably good at identifying who people are and where we can reach them.
Yet social media planning still begins with familiar assumptions:
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- Facebook is for older audiences.
- TikTok belongs to Gen Z.
- LinkedIn is for professionals.
- Pinterest is for women planning weddings or home projects.
These shortcuts are useful. They help marketers make decisions quickly. But shortcuts have a way of becoming assumptions—and assumptions can become expensive.
In our latest research, we analyzed social media behavior among nearly 4,800 U.S. adults to better understand why people choose specific platforms. The goal wasn’t to replace demographics. In fact, the research confirmed they’re still fundamental to media planning.
What it also revealed is that demographics often stop just short of explaining where the best opportunities exist.
The biggest opportunities aren’t always new platforms. They’re often overlooked audiences hiding inside familiar ones.
Take Discord. Most marketers associate it with young men, and the data generally supports that. But when we layered in the behavioral science of Values—the underlying motivations that influence behavior —we uncovered a highly engaged segment of young women motivated by Freedom who also over-index on the platform. That’s an audience many media plans would never intentionally pursue.
We saw this pattern again and again. Within the same demographic group, platform preferences shifted depending on what people valued most. The question was no longer, “Where do 18–34-year-old women spend time?” It became, “Which 18–34-year-old women are most engaged here, and why?”
That’s a far more valuable planning question.
Today’s marketers have incredible buying tools. We can activate audiences in real time, optimize continuously, and target with remarkable precision. Yet many planning conversations still begin with broad demographic assumptions.
Who uses this platform? It’s an important question.
Why do they choose this platform? That’s the one we should be asking.
One of the findings that stayed with me wasn’t about a single platform, it was about efficiency. Some Values-based audiences clustered tightly around just a few platforms, while others were broadly distributed across the social ecosystem.
If your audience naturally concentrates in fewer environments, your media strategy should look different than if they’re spread across every major platform. That changes how you think about channel selection, budget allocation, and competitive differentiation.
As the mindset shifts to an audience-first planning approach, I believe the next competitive advantage won’t come from collecting more data. It will come from asking better questions of the data we already have.
Platforms will always have demographic profiles. Increasingly, they also have behavioral fingerprints. Marketers who understand both won’t simply buy media more efficiently, they’ll uncover audiences their competitors never thought to look for.
If you’re responsible for building smarter social media strategies, I invite you to explore our latest research, Values-Based Media Intelligence: Revealing untapped audience opportunities in social media. It explores how layering audience motivations alongside demographics uncovers overlooked opportunities for more effective media planning.