[kjeetgill]

Have you worked in advertising? It's nothing nearly so simplistic, but not so complicated either.

It's not about capturing the highest income audience its capturing the largest audience in the income demographic of your product.

Think something like (amount a customer will spend) * (% of demo willing to spend at all) * (size of income demo). Naturally more people are less rich and the first two terms are highly product dependent.

Stereotyping a bit, McDonalds isn't going to be making big inroads showing all of their ads in opera houses and Lamborghini is not making any sales advertising at Goodwill.

[retsibsi]

This still implies that higher-income eyeballs will be more valuable, doesn't it? McDonald's might not value rich people so highly, but Lamborghini will be willing to pay 10,000x more per customer gained. Of course the details could confound this (supply and demand for each category of consumer, conversion rates, etc.), but it seems like a reasonable default assumption.