Targeted Marketing to Parents Online
Of all the buzzwords circulating the marketing services industry, perhaps none has struck as strong a chord as “targeted marketing.” The Internet increasingly furthers the targeted-marketing concept by creating an efficient and scalable direct-response medium for reaching vertical audiences worldwide.
Nowhere is this trend more clear than in the $36-billion parenting sector. Internet company iVillage.com, the leading women’s network on the Web and partially owned by America Online and NBC, recently acquired Lamaze Publishing Co., a leading publisher of educational parenting information, for $86.7 million in stock.
Through Lamaze’s print, video, and cable television products, iVillage will reach the parents and families of more than 3.5 million babies born each year in the U.S., and channel these users to its online parenting and e-commerce sites (including Parent Soup, Parents Place, iBaby, and iMaternity), where parents can communicate with other parents, consult with parenting experts, join support groups, and purchase baby products from home. For manufacturers of baby products and other advertisers targeting young and expectant parents, iVillage will thus offer an extremely attractive forum for reaching a large audience of young and impressionable first-time parents who are hungry for information and eager to buy baby products.
iVillage is not the only Internet company targeting parents online. Competitors include eToys (which acquired BabyCenter in June), Women.com (which went public in August), and Oxygen Media (which has made several smaller parenting acquisitions), as well as portals such as Excite and Yahoo. As competition for leadership in the parenting category heats up, additional acquisitions are likely.
