In the summer of 2025 I was on a panel at the Amazon Ads Leaders Summit, which runs alongside the Cannes Lions festival, and afterward the Amazon Ads team sat down with me for a Q&A that Jenn Roberts Ma published in August. The short version of what I told them is that values are the most stable thing you can know about a customer. Your age changes every year and your shopping history changes every week. The values you've had since you were young stay with you, and every decision you make gets checked against them.
They asked where this all started, so I told them about the ribbon-cutting parties at the end of the real estate campaigns my agency used to run. I'd look around the room at the people who had bought and think, why are you here, you don't fit the demographic we targeted. It took me a while to work out that they'd all come for the same reason, which was that we'd accidentally positioned the building to match what they valued. I also walked them through the three-legged stool, where demographics fence in the audience, psychographics show you what people did in the past, and values show you what they're likely to do next. Amazon's own research points the same way. They found people are 2.1 times more unified by their entertainment choices than by which generation they belong to.
You can read the original at Amazon Ads.
My new book walks you through all kinds of ways to identify (and use) your values, and it's available for pre-order now. It's called The Values Map, and I would be very grateful if you pre-ordered a copy. My publisher would love it too. ❤️
Everything gets easier when you know What Matters Most.
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