We get many briefs from digital agencies and clients outlining in great detail the age and interests of the customers they are targeting with particular products. The ideal customer, we learn, reads Grazia magazine, is 18-30, is a pre-family female. Or he is a time poor urban professional dad who relies on the internet for his news. How, the agencies, ask us, can they use the web to reach these demographics?

It is possible to get demographic clues from user generated content. There are techniques we deploy to determine sex and age amongst writers who have expressed views about products or brands. Some writers even provide profile information explaining that they are fans of Embrace, or give their age (albeit claiming to be 97), their location, and other interests.

The question I would ask clients and agencies is: why? Why are you trying to discover the demographic profile of your customer by inferring it from partial evidence online? How does it help your sales?

Looking for demographic information profiling ignores the most useful and fundamental characteristic of web-based content, which is that it is driven by passions. Reading online conversations you aren’t in the position of trying to infer than someone might be a customer by discovering their age, location and music tastes. You know that they are a customer because they tell you. You know how they feel about your product because they tell you. You know how they are connected to their social circle on a key topic because the web offers you contextual links which you can analyse.

So, without getting into demographics at all, the web offers you the answers to the following questions:

a) What do my customers and other stakeholders think about me?
b) What do they think about my competitors?
c) How should I be improving my product?
d) Which customers do I need to talk to?
e) What are their key interests?

The internet – let’s not forget – is driven by passions. Every day hundreds of millions directly tell the brands of the world what they want by entering terms into search engines. They traverse content sites driven by the information they find most useful. Between that information – John Battelle’s “database of intentions” – and the kind of market research we provide, what’s not to know?

This information is so direct, so useful, that it is a constant surprise to us that brands are still using indirect methods and demographic profiling to buy space in media. And the media – naturally – still present themselves in demographic terms. Online marketing requires navigation (and commercial exploitation) by the key themes that drive our passions.

AFTERWORD: there is a good story by Robert Colville about the demographics of UK broadsheet press in the Telegraph blogs picking up on an Economist piece which suggests that these papers are disproportionately read in London and the South East.