Best Little Blog

Be Magical, Be Successful

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” As Behavioral Targeting becomes more prevalent in the market these words written in 1961 must hold even truer.

Ever think about how some word associations are stuck in time like “far out” or “rad”? Well for our industry one of the more common words used is “creepy.” That said, agencies and advertisers alike are looking to explore the behavioral marketing frontier and exploit all the capabilities we now have. Acutely customizing creatives seems to be a hot topic. we constantly get asked about including a person’s name in an ad for someone that didn’t complete a registration form. My immediate reaction? Creepy!

When working with behavioral targeting and all its amazing capabilities, we have to always remember to avoid the creepy factor! No one truly knows where the creepy line is drawn, but I think it’s safe to say that as soon as you include (let alone gather!!) personal information, and that person has no idea how you got it, you’ve successfully crossed into Creepland!

Don’t get me wrong, it’s extremely important that behavioral ads get your prospects attention and create the ‘ah factor’, making the ad like magic in their minds. Garnering the “Oh I was just on that site,” or “Oh cool, I need one of those.”

There are four important elements that go into making a retargeting ad truly magical (and effective).

·         Make your brand prominent

·         Keep consistent

·         Speak Differently

·         Achieve the “these guys are huge” factor

Your brand has to be the most important thing, so keep your logo prominent and your brand consistent. Let’s face it, we can only store so many things in our brains and your product is probably not on the top of their list. We’re much better at recalling that which is visual vs text. So it’s important to carry over your website’s color and format to your retargeting ads. If you’re breaking down your campaigns by category, make sure the ads are consistent with the pages visited.

Probably the hardest element to grasp without crossing into Creepland is to speak differently. Your messages need to speak to a prospect in a different way than ads that would drive them to your site for the first time. Keep in mind, that at least briefly, the prospect has come in contact with your brand and was interested enough to check out your website. So using the same old banners from your RON campaign isn’t gonna cut it. And remember, people just aren’t going to read more than a couple words in your ad, so give them a reason to COME back to your website, WITHOUT being creepy!

Be magical, “Need to send Flowers to someone you Love?”  “FREE SHIPPING if you click here.”  Don’t be creepy, “Still looking for flowers?”

Finally, achieve the “these guys are huge” factor. More often than not, prospects leave your site because they were distracted, still looking or short on time. If you let them go without staying in front of them you will probably lose them for good. One of the most important lessons we’ve learned is that the return rate of your prospects is huge when you simply remain in front of them. It’s the “these guys are huge” factor, same idea as wanting to eat at the restaurant that is always crowded.

It’s a fine line that we walk, magical and creepy, but if you can do it correctly the rewards will be enormous. Be magical, and in the eyes of your prospects you’ll be that crowded restaurant and they will eat.

Bringing BT To Main Street: Reality Check

Published by Behavioral Insider 12/12/07

Written by Phil Leggiere

Like many other groups of insiders, those of us immersed in online advertising 24/7 tend to live in a professional bubble. Within this particular bubble, "everybody" knows about the inner recesses and nuances of behavioral targeting. In the conversation below, FetchBack CEO Chad Little explains why, despite all the dutiful lip service paid to the notion of the long tail, behavioral concepts have a long way to go before they become truly relevant to the middle market.

Behavioral Insider: How would you characterize the progress that developing behavioral targeting strategies, especially retargeting, has had in 2007?

Chad Little: It's always hard for those of us on the inside of this space to put ourselves into the heads of those outside the industry. We feel by now that behavioral targeting, especially retargeting, the most basic and practically applicable part of BT, should be a line item for everybody. But once you get beneath the really big advertisers, everyone on the 'inside' hears about into the mid-market of smaller or more regional businesses, you see that's surprisingly not really the case at all. So there's a lot of educational work ahead to explain what all this buzz is about, and whether and how [retargeting] can really be applied to the real world most advertisers live in.

BI: How is retargeting perceived by those businesses?

Little: People have a vague sense of what retargeting is, or more precisely that it's something they ought to know about. But when it comes to actually trying to implement it, they don't know where or how to start. There are all sorts of misconceptions and, unfortunately, some ad networks, touting the virtues of behavioral retargeting, haven't been educational. There's a lot of miseducation or just ignorance.

BI: What kind of ignorance?

Little: I liken it to the early days of search. If you recall when paid search was new, everybody bought their 50 keywords, wrote some copy and threw it out there. That's about where we are. The majority of advertisers still utilize the same creative for re-targeted ads as they do for driving people into the front door.

BI: How are you addressing that or trying to speed up the learning curve?

Little: The first step -- and I'd again make the analogy somewhat to early search -- is to make more sophisticated campaign development and management simple and accessible. Where we're trying to focus is where advertisers really are. Of course it's natural for them to start with a customer prospect who went to their home page. But once they begin that, you can show them that there's also enormous untapped value in customers who've abandoned their shopping carts or repeat customers. Getting them to focus on those most basic elements and think about varying creative, and then from there paying attention to sequencing of messaging, are the building blocks. Doing them well is as far as many, perhaps most, advertisers, will ever go, or need to go.

BI: So you don't really see a role for more granular content segmentation, the semantic web?

Little: We promote sub-segmentation of different elements and pages on the site, and by customer type, in situations where it makes sense. Comparison shopping sites, for instance, have so much rich data to leverage. Or, if you talk about the really big guys where a one-half point difference means tens of millions of dollars. But for the mid-market the value of segmentation at that level is not clear at this point. It's relatively easy to develop great technologies. The issue isn't that. It's that you need a critical mass of a million advertisers and publishers, whether it's contextual or behavioral. You can do category-based targeting if you have lots of advertisers and a critical mass of auto shoppers. But for most companies out there, these segments are just not going to be sliceable and diceable, and at the same time big enough to really move the needle.

BI: What does move the needle?

Little: The value proposition of behavioral targeting that really does move the needle for a small company is that it's a lot more efficient in terms of marketing resources to close a warm lead than it is to develop a new cold one from scratch. I'm continually surprised by the numbers I see for marketers on ROI. Certainly ROI is important for all marketers. What I push clients to do is define what it means, and that means you have to go beyond clicks or even the ratio of clicks to conversions. I think there's actually more interesting work being done in Europe now focused on the metric of impressions to clicks.

For the mid-tier marketer, clicks are everything because they can't afford display ads. Retargeting can change that. The idea is to use display as economically as search has been used. The goal is to get education to the point where the conventional premise of advertising, that 99% or 100% of your budget should go to drive traffic to your site, ignoring the 98% of prospects who leave and never come back, can be challenged. It's a premise that goes against every bit of marketing common sense.

BI: Looking ahead to 2008, what are the priorities for pushing retargeting out to the mid-tier?

Little: What's missing is a unified way of serving sequential ads across multiple sites. The way things work now, advertisers need to separately tag each type of traffic source. One way of working at serious scale is to allow advertisers to work with multiple sites and networks with just a single line of code. If we had the platform, the fragmentation and complexity which makes campaign reporting a nightmare, especially for mid-market advertisers, could be overcome. This is a priority area for us going into 2008. We're piloting a project which is designed precisely to get at this issue, an exchange-based retargeting system about which we'll have a lot more to say soon.