Pockets are situations, not demographics.

Every ad platform will happily sell you demographics. Age bands, genders, job titles, interests. It feels like targeting because it narrows the audience, and narrowing feels like precision. But demographics answer a question nobody asked. The question that decides whether your ad works is not who is this person. It is what is happening to them right now.

In the first piece in this series we defined an audience pocket as a group of buyers who share a situation and an awareness level. This piece is about why the situation half does the heavy lifting, and why the demographic labels most businesses target with are close to useless for writing ads.

Two identical demographics, two opposite pockets

Take two dental clinic owners. Same age band, same income band, same city, same job title. Any demographic targeting system in the world puts them in one audience.

The first one has a front desk that misses half its inbound calls. Her problem is capacity at the top: enquiries evaporate before they become bookings. The second has a full calendar of low-value appointments and cannot get the high-value treatment cases she actually built the clinic for. Her problem is the mix, not the volume.

Now write one ad for both of them. You cannot. An ad about missed calls is irrelevant to the second owner. An ad about attracting implant cases is irrelevant to the first. Whatever you write that fits both of them fits neither, which is exactly how most service ads end up sounding: “grow your practice”, said to everyone, heard by no one.

The research behind this is decades old

This is not our private theory. Clayton Christensen and his co-authors made the same argument in “Know Your Customers’ Jobs to Be Done” (Harvard Business Review, 2016): customers do not buy products because of their own attributes, they “hire” products to make progress in a specific circumstance. His famous milkshake study found that the same milkshake was being hired for two completely different jobs: a one-handed breakfast for long commutes in the morning, and a treat for placating children in the afternoon. Same product, same demographic data, two different buyers defined entirely by situation.

Sixty years before the ad platforms existed, the direct response copywriter Robert Collier put the writing side of it in one line: the job of a sales message is to enter the conversation already taking place in the customer’s mind. The conversation in a buyer’s mind is about their situation. It is never about their age band.

Why the platforms cannot save you here

Modern delivery systems are genuinely good at finding people, and we let them do that work. But the platform can only find more of whoever responds. If your ad is generic, the people who respond are a generic smear across every situation in the market, and the algorithm dutifully finds you more of that smear. The machine amplifies whatever signal you give it. Situation-specific ads give it a clean signal: the people who stop on an ad about missed calls are, overwhelmingly, people missing calls.

How to find the situations in your own market

You do not brainstorm situations in a meeting room, because the ones you invent will be the ones you already know about. You collect them:

• The first two minutes of sales calls, where prospects describe what pushed them to book, in their own words.
• Reviews of you and your competitors. A review is a situation report written by a buyer who just made the journey your ad is trying to start.
• Lost deals. The situations you lose consistently are pockets too, and knowing them keeps you from paying to attract them.

When the list is honest, it is longer than you expect, and a small number of situations account for most of the revenue. That short list is what your ad account should be organised around. Not audiences. Not demographics. Situations, one ad each.

The test

Read your current ad and ask one question: could a buyer tell, from the first line, that you know what is happening in their business this week? If the answer is no, the ad is targeting a demographic. Demographics do not buy anything. People in situations do.