I hate flying out of LAX. Not because I hate flying, I don’t. But because it frightens the marketing guy in me.

On a flight from LAX to San Francisco, in a plane climbing to 35,000 feet, looking down on the sprawling cities below, you can’t help but gasp at how big it is and how many people all live in one place.

You look down at all those houses, at all those cars, on all those streets and you realize — there’s absolutely no way I’m going to be able to reach all of those people.

Fortunately, if you’re marketing the smart, modern way, you also don’t need to market to all those people.

So take out your marketing funnel, pour in people of Los Angeles and as the funnel gets more narrow so does your target market.

Maybe we remove people over the age of 40, focus on those with a plausible interest in technology, highlight a handful of zip codes, set an income floor at $40,000/year, integrate past purchase history, consider top channel preferences and suddenly, it’s less about marketing to Los Angeles as a whole and more about breaking down a metropolis into a more manageable target market.

Thinking about targeted marketing isn’t just for small businesses. The world’s largest brands target their marketing with teams of highly-sophisticated customer models.

And they do it because it puts their money to work — they’re not wasting it on consumers who don’t care about their products otherwise. Targeting is a CFO’s best friend.

And knowing all that exists and that it’s a critical part to any campaign, makes flights a little more enjoyable.