Rethinking Audience Targeting With the R.E.M. Framework

Do you truly understand who your audience is and what drives them? For the past two decades, marketers leaned heavily on data to answer that question. But as cookie tracking faded, user signals dwindled, and analytics shifted toward sampling , a shift we call the “signal-loss era” , that data superpower has weakened. Meanwhile, we’ve handed over control to hyper-personalized platforms with opaque “black box” targeting algorithms, leaving us less able to grasp what’s actually happening. In the process, we lost sight of the user.

Paradoxically, the flood of data made us lazy. “Data-informed” became the gold standard, while “user-informed” strategies quietly disappeared. The trouble with that over-reliance on data is that it let us forget a fundamental truth: we are communicating with humans, building connections. We obsessed over outcomes and lost the drive to understand who we’re connecting with, why they choose us, or why they leave.

But signal loss and AI-driven targeting don’t have to be constraints. In fact, they’re a powerful invitation to return to marketing basics. Instead of chasing fragmented data traces, we can focus on truly understanding the user as a person. And when we know them, we serve them better , forging stronger, more lasting connections.

The Real Opportunity: Understanding Users and How to Reach Them

Even if we still had all the old data, would it be enough? I doubt it. That data assumes user behavior is limited to what we can observe. In reality, behavior is shaped by small, automatic decisions happening below the surface , often driving outcomes before any action is even tracked.

What’s more, when we talk about “understanding the user,” we often reduce it to knowing their needs and a rough demographic. That’s only part of the picture. Users are people with unique needs and thought patterns at every stage of their consideration journey.

Now more than ever, we need to know who we’re talking to. What makes them choose us over a competitor? What media and channels do they use? What emotional triggers actually matter to them? What’s important at each step of their journey? Only after answering these questions can we claim to have scratched the surface.

I’ve said it before: human decision-making is inherently imperfect, shaped by cognitive biases and heuristics that help us navigate complexity without analyzing every option. That’s why knowing what people want is rarely enough , you also need to know how they decide.

When we fully understand the user, we can shape our approach before outcomes emerge, inform testing and platform targeting, and even anticipate results before execution.

A Practical Alternative to Cookie-Based Strategies: The R. E. M. Framework

To reach the right audience even when data is scarce and tracking unreliable, focus on three simple goals: be Relevant, be Everywhere, and be Memorable , across your creatives, messaging, and channel choices. I call this the R. E. M. Framework.

1. Be Relevant (And Relatable)

Relevancy is the first gateway to attention. In a world saturated with competing stimuli, it’s one of the brain’s primary filters for deciding what deserves focus.

Think about the cocktail party effect. You’re deep in conversation with a friend in a noisy room, but if someone else says your name, your attention snaps to them instantly. That’s because stimuli relevant to our personal experience, context, and goals automatically capture attention , even when we’re engaged elsewhere. This happens constantly on social media.

Attention is often called “marketing’s primary currency,” and for good reason. In a saturated market, you have only seconds to spark interest before users move on. Content that doesn’t generate early engagement gets dropped by algorithms, which won’t serve it to others.

This is the “three-second rule,” and it may be optimistic for platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels, where short-form video dominates. These formats make people forget what they came for much faster than long-form content. If your hook isn’t instantly strong, you lose them.

To capture interest early, we need to understand how attention works. Humans are constantly exposed to multiple stimuli at once. We can’t process them all, so we select some and ignore others through a process called selective attention. This can be driven by internal motivations (endogenous orienting) or external triggers (exogenous orienting). In other words, we focus based on our own goals , like a deadline , or on standout features in our environment , like a ringing phone or a bold word.

That gives us two ways to engage someone’s attention: connect with their goals, or present something that stands out. Relevancy sits between these two processes and can engage both. When we’re searching for something, we filter for results that match our goal. But the reverse also works: something relevant to our needs will jump out even when we’re mindlessly scrolling.

So relevancy is a catch-all for attention.

How do you make sure you’re immediately relevant? Identify what your audience needs and lead with the solution in your hook. Don’t waste time on obscure messaging or secondary angles. Save those for after you’ve anchored attention. The strongest tests and creatives focus on the user and what they’re trying to solve , not on the business. Make the audience see themselves in what you offer, and you’ll shorten the time it takes for them to recognize you as the right choice.

2. Be Everywhere (Your Audience Is)

Can you be relevant to everyone? Of course not. That’s why it’s essential to understand your audience and their motivations to capture existing demand. Beyond that, you need to be present where they can find you, with the message they’re looking for in that moment.

This is a major challenge now that customer journeys are scattered across platforms and search experiences. People discover us through LLM queries, social posts, Google searches , most likely all of them. A consideration journey isn’t linear; it’s a continuous loop of discovery and evaluation, known as “The Messy Middle.” Even the best attribution models rarely capture it.

The solution is to work cross-functionally and cast a wide net across different channels. Visibility builds trust. “Out of sight, out of mind” is real: our brain forms associations that strengthen with repeated exposure and drops what isn’t used. If you’re consistently present where your audience is, with relevant content, you create the perception that you’re everywhere , without actually being everywhere.

That matters because repeated exposure is part of how we make choices. It’s called the availability heuristic: we favor what comes to mind easily , what we’ve seen often, recently, or remember clearly. Think about recommending a movie. You’re far more likely to mention something you just watched than something from years ago.

So while relevance gets you noticed, presence keeps you top of mind. When someone is ready to act, you’re already part of their consideration set , often before they even start searching.

Of course, going omnichannel is a beast. Creatives that work on one platform won’t work on another. You still need to test and iterate. But if you approach it from a customer lens, the work simplifies. The benefits are two-fold: you target different moments in the journey and stay top of mind.

How do you prioritize channels with limited resources? Start with demographic research, personas, and early discovery data. But that only gets you so far. Knowing who people are doesn’t tell you what they do when they make a choice, or how those behaviors shift across the journey. You have to find that out yourself: How do they make decisions? Who do they trust for information? Where do they go to find it? And just as importantly, where are they when they’re not actively looking, and how can you meet them there?

This is where personas fall short. They tell you what people need and who they are, but not how they feel when making a decision. Often, what gets labeled a bad strategy is simply incomplete research. To truly understand your audience, you need all of this information.

3. Be Memorable

Being memorable is the variable that still carries the most weight , yet it’s the hardest to achieve. Why? Because it relies on creating a meaningful connection with the audience. And what that connection looks like varies widely across individuals.

The traditional playbook for producing emotion in marketing has often assumed we share the same basic reactions, based on Paul Ekman’s six basic emotions: fear, anger, happiness, surprise, disgust, and sadness. While some of these are universal, the human emotional experience is far more nuanced, modulated by personal context, expectation, cultural values, and more.

Attention works similarly across individuals, but memorability relies on personal context, values, and experiences. Think about an ad that stayed with you. Why do you remember it? Chances are, it’s because of how it made you feel. Another reader would choose a completely different ad.

Some brands, messages, or creatives stick because they elicit an emotional reaction. They make us laugh, trigger nostalgia, sometimes outrage us. But they all make us feel something. Even when we rely on rules of thumb like familiarity bias or social proof, it’s often because those choices feel validated and safe.

We often hear that people make decisions emotionally, then justify them rationally. This idea is supported by Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis, which proposes that emotional signals influence decision-making. Neurophysiological evidence shows that physiological arousal varies between liked and disliked brands, pointing to the role of emotion in brand evaluation.

That’s important because how we feel about a brand determines not just our perceptions but our entire experience with them , including trust and willingness to engage. We remember experiences for how they made us feel. We connect with some brands and their ethos, and disconnect from others. Once you gain memorability with your audience, retaining them , and guiding them to choose you , becomes much easier.

What does this mean for you? Go beyond knowing what your user needs or what catches their eye. Understand their personal and cultural context, how they feel, what their expectations and values are. These are all aspects that influence the relationship between brand and consumer. A genuine connection makes the user bypass intermediate evaluation and sets you apart from competitors , looping back to the relevancy you aimed for in the first step of this framework.

Key Takeaways

Catching attention isn’t the only metric of success in the signal-loss and hyper-personalization era. You need to be everywhere and stay top of mind when your audience is looking for the solution you offer. That means knowing your users, their motivations, and their emotional states to capture existing demand and connect with them wherever they are.

Easy? Not really. But here are some starting points:

• Find what your audience needs by collating data beyond search. Use customer service logs, user interviews, and social scraping , for your brand and competitors , to capture both pre-purchase and post-purchase journeys. Use that data to inform your USP and messaging in tests and creatives. Make it all about them, not you.
• Don’t take channels for granted or ignore them because they don’t serve your immediate KPIs. Visibility is often the result of compound actions and cross-functional collaboration. Map your discoverability across channels, content formats, and consumption methods so you can target different moments in your audience’s journey. Let this guide your channel choices.
• Get to know your audience at a granular level. What do they feel when they search? What are their values and expectations? If they know your brand, how do they feel about it? Use those emotional drivers to determine which creatives, messaging, and formats will best create a meaningful connection.In summary, start with finding your audience, learn how they decide, and understand their underlying needs. All of this will inform your USP, product value proposition, messaging, creatives, distribution channels, and format choices.It’s time to go beyond personas and start looking at the real people behind the screen.