My Photo

Twitter Updates

    follow me on Twitter

    Photo Albums

    Blog Links

    • Blog Directory - Blogged

    BlogCatalog

    • My BlogCatalog BlogRank
    My Squidoo Lens

    June 26, 2008

    FetchBack Makes a Strategic Move – To Tempe, Arizona

    FetchBack Makes a Strategic Move – To Tempe, Arizona

    June 9, 2008, Tempe, AZ –FetchBack Inc., an innovative online advertising company specializing in a form of behavioral targeting called Retargeting, is now calling sunny Tempe, Arizona home with the moving of their unique offices. Milk Bones and rawhides can be found next to the printers in this quirky office, as employees are encouraged to bring in their four-legged friends as often as they can.

    The historic Andre Building, now occupied by FetchBack, is over 100 years old and was originally home to a variety of businesses in the early 1900’s and is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The move was made to put the company in the heart of the booming area becoming increasingly known for its technology-based businesses lining the popular street and occupying the newly built sky rises.

    “We made the move to advantage of the great atmosphere that’s right outside our door. The area as a whole is becoming a sort of hub for technology firms and we really wanted to be right in the middle of that. It’s also a great location to have clients for our clients to visit and the street is always filled with a varying crowd; making for quite an interesting environment,” says Chad Little, the company’s Chief Retriever.

    FetchBack’s patent-pending technology allows their advertisers to communicate with browsers once they have navigated away from their website with acutely targeted ads. This form of online advertising delivers a strong ROI and reduces the amount of time spent executing campaigns due to the functionality of their ad serving technology. This technology-based company seems to be in exactly the right location for endless growth.

    The behavioral targeting industry as a whole is on the rise, with FetchBack in the forefront of the Retargeting segment. With an experienced Board of Directors and top-notch management team, there’s no doubt this company will be renewing their lease in the years to come.

    FetchBack is the only company that specializes only in Retargeting and has developed a patent-pending technology that eases implementation, increases reach and improves results. Retargeting with FetchBack is one of the most effective forms of advertising and can be catered to any size business imaginable. For marketing or press information please contact Kim Stearns at 480.289.5584 or Kim@fetchback.com.

    June 24, 2008

    ClickZ Article

    Elyse Tager

    Fetching Back Behavioral Targeting

    In the science fiction movie, "Minority Report," Tom Cruise plays a police officer forced to flee after he's falsely accused of a murder he has yet to commit. At one point in the movie, Cruise's character walks through a mall and is personally greeted by electronic billboards and displays ads, like a Gap ad commenting about the shirts he last bought. Let's see how behavioral targeting evolves from the seeds planted in the present to the not-so-distant future.

    To provide more insight into this topic, I caught up with Chad Little, chief retriever for FetchBack, a company that's developed innovative technology aimed at "retargeting" advertising and marketing toward consumers.

    Elyse Tager: Explain in more detail about your patent-technology and how it can evolve behavioral targeting for the future.

    Chad Little: FetchBack has developed technology from the ground up by industry veterans who had developed several other ad-serving solutions over the years. The idea was to combine our knowledge of the industry, having developed several other ad-serving solutions, and develop the ideal technology solution for delivering retargeted ads. It's our vision that retargeting will become a line-item budget for marketers. Advertisers will need the most robust solution available to meet their CPA [define] objectives and at the same time allow the mom-and-pop shop to have access to this type of advertising.

    The portion of the technology that will be most beneficial to marketing professionals is the comprehensive ROI [define] reports that can be generated. It allows them to track where every advertising penny is being spent over a given time period.

    The heart of our technology is to simplify the process of implementation so that everyone can use it and at the same time provide more conversions for any given advertiser better than any other product on the market, provide the most comprehensive analytics specific to retargeting, and deliver the most conversions by delivering substantially more reach than any competitive network.

    Other than paid search and affiliate marketing, this is the only form of advertising that can work for any advertiser, regardless of size. We believe our technology and vision substantially evolves the behavioral advertising marketplace, as other forms of [behavioral targeting] will not work for everyone. Essentially, this is a way to democratize behavioral retargeting and level the playing field.

    ET: How can e-tail sites that fail their customers with their recommendation functions refine them to better address what their customers want?

    CL: Well, this is not exactly where our expertise lies. Ultimately, though, it boils down to data and learning how to interpret that data. Categorized [behavioral targeting], retargeting, and recommendation engines are all trying to give users more relevant information that can ultimately enhance their experience online.

    Criteo is a company doing interesting things in the space. As they refine their algorithms and expand the breadth of factors included in those algorithms, recommendation engines will become more accurate in predicting what actually is relevant to a customer. The more experience a company has, the more data they have and the more accurate they can be in their predictions.

    A lot of things go on beyond the click, but who knows whether or not the companies developing these engines are looking there. No doubt they are getting more and more intelligent, though.

    Watch for companies taking relevant recommendations outside their Web site. It rained in Phoenix a couple weeks ago, and that day a friend of mine got an e-mail from Amazon about a new pair of windshield wipers. I told him he was a fool if he thought that was mere coincidence.

    ET: What is the current status of behavioral targeting technology and its uses from an e-tail perspective, and how far can we take targeting in the next generation?

    CL: Behavioral targeting can be put into two segments: categorized behavioral and retargeting. We believe that retargeting is significant enough to have its own focus outside of categorized behavioral targeting. We believe strongly that most e-tailers can double the effectiveness of their current ad spends by retargeting alone, with plenty of room to grow.

    The only thing hindering this idea from skyrocketing is privacy concerns. We collect absolutely no personally identifiable data, but the subject is very much in the forefront of the media at the moment. If this topic can be overcome and communicated, then we really are just looking at the very beginning of the possibilities associated with [behavioral targeting].

    Future growth will come from a deeper understanding of what each individual consumer is interested in on your site, something provided by current [behavioral targeting] companies. And a greater understanding of how they landed on your site will help to better target individuals based on every single action taken to get to your site.

    We're seeing that retargeted impressions are having a big effect on client traffic. This data goes far beyond the click though. We've started looking at really granule data with regards to view-based conversions. Banner ads have had a bad rap in the past, but look for targeted banners to become a more valuable part of a marketing plan, as the information we're seeing starts to surface. It's literally industry-changing.

    Another factor in the future success of [behavioral targeting] is the creative content that your consumers will see. So much of online advertising's focus has shifted to paid search; rich in text, lacking in creativity. To date, display advertising has been relegated to the few. Retargeting hopes to reintroduce the importance of creative online advertising to marketers who have grown very accustomed to the simplicity and ease of paid search. What becomes effective with retargeting is the ability to dynamically select ads based on the actions a visitor has taken on the Web site. It's already a challenge for companies to get quality online creative. As interest increases in targeted banner advertising, the problem is only going to become more prevalent.

    Better analytics will be needed to monitor performance that goes well beyond clicks to paint a much more accurate picture of the effect on the consumer; and these analytics need to be proactive!

    ET: Do you expect the type of retargeting that you do can translate well into the offline world, like being reminded of shirts you bought at the Gap?

    CL: We can see the beginnings of this happening with the Amazon e-mail campaign in the example I gave earlier. Retargeting and [behavioral targeting] will expand first to every other form of online advertising. And as the Internet becomes the delivery mechanism for other media, the line between online and offline will blur.

    The key to making something like this work offline is the ability to deliver messages that are timely and dynamic. The commercial printing industry has been trying to make direct mail campaigns more relevant for a while now. I could easily see an intelligent e-tailer taking the customer data they gather on the Web and integrating that into not only retargeting and e-mail campaigns but a variable-data direct mail piece as well.

    Based on what we can see from our data, we see an increase in total conversion rates for our advertisers that are coming especially from those who were simply exposed to the ad. There's no question that retargeted ads influence purchasing behavior. Even if it's on a subconscious level, it would just be a matter of tying together the offline and online worlds that would be the tricky part.

    June 06, 2008

    Articles and Pupdates!

    So it seems that my pup doesn't make the best employee. Apparently it's frowned upon when employees here make the kitchen a toilet. A bit strict, don't you think? At least she is still invited to visit from time to time. Maybe we can hire her on a contract basis...when someone drops some food or something. I'll have to talk to Chad about that one.

    On a side note, or perhaps, the main note, I've been working like a dog lately (ok, you guessed it, I'm obsessed with dogs! There could be worse things, you know?!) on getting some articles written about retargeting and some other benefits of it and so on and so forth. Apprently EzineArticles.com thinks I am some type of expert author, and you know what, I will take one for the team and go ahead and accept that title.

    Check them out!

    In other news, I have been reading a TON of articles about behavioral targeting and how creepy it is and how unfair etc...so I'm thinking my next post will be a breakdown of the difference between categorized BT and retargeting. Just to clear up some of the confusion.


    Check back soon!!!

    While you're patiently waiting, you should check out our site! We recently added a bunch of new sections and content!

    May 27, 2008

    Case Study Released!

    Retargeting specialists, FetchBack, worked with client Designer Plumbing Outlet on a retargeting campaign to gain a larger presence online. Their results are simply astonishing...and can work for anyone.

    read more | digg story

    May 16, 2008

    Greetings from the new ‘Bark’eting Manager

    Hi Everyone!

    I just wanted to take a second to introduce myself and let you know that, despite what you may think, there was no hostile takeover of this blog, but in fact, Cassie graciously handed it over to me. I know you will all miss her, but I hope I can fill those nice shoes of hers.

    I am the new Marketing (see the ‘Bark’eting connection, yeah I know, I’m good) Manager here at FetchBack so I am in charge of lots of things including the very professional sounding job of writing some things, making some other things look pretty, and writing this blog! I just recently graduated from ASU with a Marketing degree from the W.P. Carey School of Business with minors in international business and small business & entrepreneurship, so I am hard at work putting this education to good use. If you ever want to chat about professors you may have had or want to commiserate with me about the food in the Memorial Union, the chairs in Hayden Library, or the ultra slippery side-walks feel free to contact me at kim@fetchback.com. I love to reminisce!

    I would also like to take a second to introduce my puppy, Tori. She is a border collie mix (some guesses include: Welsh Corgi, Daschund, Jack Russel…your guess is as good as mine) just over a year old, and I found her cute little self at an animal shelter down here in Tempe. She recently visited the FetchBack office and was loved by all. I’m pretty sure Greg (a Sales Executive) would have taken her home with him if he actually carried a purse (don’t they make man-purses, called ‘murses’? Birthday gift idea, anyone?). In fact, Chad said to me today that “Tori is the perfect office dog,” so I am thinking of just bringing her with me to work every day and giving her a job to do, of course.

    Here is a potential list of tasks I would like her to complete each day:

    1.       Lick everyone’s feet for at least 2 seconds

    2.       Sniff every square inch of the office each time you visit

    3.       Do cute tricks at least 2 times per day – with a treat as a reward

    4.       Curl up into a ball and nap for at least 1 hour

    5.       Give the “puppy dog eyes” to at least 2 people, resulting in a treat

    Those sound about right. That should keep her busy for most of the day. Cheap labor too, huh?

    Well enough about me and my dog. Keep checking back here often for retargeting, FetchBack, and dog news! I’m also thinking about shamelessly sticking the word “blog” in front of words to make cheesy one-liners (ex. Blogtastic, blog-er-ific), so you may want to come back for that sole reason. I know I would!

    February 12, 2008

    Internet Retailer Magazine - January 31, 2008

    Through retargeting, Hobby-Lobby wins back visitors who abandon its site

    Hobby-Lobby International Inc., a multi-channel retailer of radio-controlled model airplanes, is boosting sales among visitors who abandon its web site by retargeting them on subsequent sites they visit with ads based on their click activity on Hobby-Lobby.com, CEO Jay Graves tells InternetRetailer.com.

    “Retargeting gives us a chance to put ad impressions before people who already know who we are,” Graves says. A test of the retargeting ad program, which is based on a behavioral targeting advertising system from FetchBack Inc., showed a 20% increase in sales among consumers who were included in the retargeting ad program compared to control group that did not receive the ads, Graves says.

    “It’s a nice lift,” he adds. “We can justify the return on investment.”

    Brentwood, TN-based Hobby-Lobby (no relation to an Oklahoma City arts and crafts retailer named Hobby Lobby) went live with the FetchBack system before the 2007 holiday shopping season and has found it to be more effective than other forms of marketing, Graves says. Because Hobby-Lobby serves an extremely narrow niche of consumers—mostly male senior citizens with an interest in purchasing radio-controlled model airplanes and helicopters—other types of advertising, including mass market banner ads, have produced poor results. “Blanket ads don’t work for us,” he says.

    But the retargeting ads are proving an effective tool that complements other targeted marketing programs, including paid search and banner ads placed on content sites like RCGroups.com that attract its targeted customer base, Graves adds.

    FetchBack, based in Phoenix, maintains a network of informational web sites on which it places banner ads. Software cookies placed on Hobby-Lobby.com enable FetchBack’s network ad servers to recognize when a visitor to one of its content sites has already clicked on products on Hobby-Lobby.com, then serve up pertinent Hobby-Lobby ads while the visitor is still on the networked content site.

    Fetchback serves up ads on hundreds of thousands of sites, including social networking sites like MySpace and news content sites like ESPN.com, but it doesn’t serve ads on retailer sites that would compete with its clients, a spokeswoman says. She adds that FetchBack clients cannot control the content sites on which their ads will appear.

    FetchBack, which was launched in February 2007, operates with financial backing from Gersh Venture Partners. Additional private investors include Geoff Judge, co-founder 24/7 Media, who sits on the FetchBack board of directors, and veteran e-business investors Erik Matlick, Stephan Paternot, Bob Ellis and Jeff Stewart.

    *****

    FetchBack is the only company that specializes in retargeting and has developed a patent-pending technology that eases implementation, increases reach and improves results. Retargeting is one of the most effective forms of advertising, and it just got better. For marketing or press information please contact Kim Stearns at 480.289.5584 or Kim@FetchBack.com

    January 04, 2008

    FetchBack Raises Series A Funding Led by Gersh Venture Partners

    January 4, 2008, Phoenix, AZ – FetchBack Inc., an innovative online advertising company specializing in a form of behavioral targeting called retargeting, secured Series A funding from Gersh Venture Partners (GVP) as well as other private investors.

    GVP is a venture capital fund that invests in start-up and early-stage businesses exclusively in the financial technology and online media sectors. Other investors include Geoff Judge, who co-founded 24/7 Media (TFSM, sold to WPP) and now sits on the FetchBack Board of Directors. Erik Matlick also joins the Board and founded another GVP portfolio company, Industry Brains sold to Marchex (MCHX). Mr. Matlick brings over 10 years of media and e-business experience to the group. Joining the investor group is Stephan Paternot, who founded theglobe.com with a record setting IPO of $1 billion dollars; Bob Ellis, an investor and original board member of xoom.com (XMCM) that completed an IPO in 1999 and later merged with NBC’s Internet properties; and Jeff Stewart, founder of Mimeo.com and Square Earth which merged with Proxicom, eventually becoming a 1,000 person, publicly traded “e-consulting” firm.

    Business 2.0 and CNNmoney.com both listed FetchBack on their “What’s Next” list of top 10 products, ideas and trends.  FetchBack’s CEO and Chief Retriever was also featured in TechConnect Magazine as an “inventive start-up wizard with a relentless appetite for new challenges.”

    FetchBack offers advertisers a way to turn online browsers into buyers by serving them targeting banner ads after they have abandoned an advertiser website.  With an average of 98% of website visitors leaving without purchasing, FetchBack can provide a unique ROI solution to pair with ongoing search and banner display campaigns. With companies working hard and spending big dollars to drive prospects to their website, it only makes sense to stay in front of them after they leave.

    With an experienced board of directors, strong management team and the newly completed Series A funding, FetchBack Inc. is set to change online advertising bringing the new frontier of behavioral retargeting to advertisers worldwide.

    ###

    FetchBack is the only company that specializes in retargeting and has developed a patent-pending technology that eases implementation, increases reach and improves results. Retargeting with FetchBack is one of the most effective forms of advertising, and it just got better. For marketing or press information please contact Kim Stearns at 480.289.5584 or Kim@fetchback.com.

    December 12, 2007

    Bringing BT To Main Street: Reality Check

    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.

    Published by Behavioral Insider 12/12/07

    Written by Phil Leggiere

    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.

    December 11, 2007

    FETCHBACK NOW OFFERING THE INDUSTRY’S MOST COMPLETE ROI REPORTING FOR RETARGETING CAMPAIGNS

    December 11, 2007 (Phoenix, AZ) – FetchBack, The Retargeting Company, recently announced the launch of enhanced ROI reporting now available for all of their clients.

    Advertisers now have access to the most comprehensive retargeting ROI reports on the market. The newly released reports conversions by clickthrough and impression, allowing advertisers to better track campaign success. The industry leading ROI reports help advertisers make decisions regarding their retargeting campaigns down to the finest detail, including which creative is generating the best results and how many retargeted impressions are enough to convert the average prospect.

    FetchBack retargeting campaigns have provided great results for advertisers. In case studies, the enhanced ROI reports show that FetchBack retargeting campaigns created significant increases in conversions, some by as much as 25%.

    FetchBack is the only company that specializes in retargeting and has developed a patent-pending technology that eases implementation, increases reach and improves results. Retargeting with FetchBack is one of the most effective forms of advertising, and it just got better.

    ###

    For marketing or press information please contact Kim Stearns at 480.289.5584 or Kim@FetchBack.com.

    November 13, 2007

    Ad:Tech New York - Never a Dull Moment!

    We had a great time this year at ad:tech, with a constant flow of people and tasty chocolate dog treats how could we go wrong!

    This year we even sent some special treats over to the K-9 troops over in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hundreds of ad:tech attendees signed card of gratitude and encouragement for our furry friends overseas. The cards and treats were shipped out after the show and should arrive in the desert any day now.

    Here are a few pictures from the show, hope to see you all next time at ad:tech San Francisco!

    Imgp0734_2 Imgp0727_2 Matt_christian_2 Imgp0717 Imgp0733_2 1923506291_bb385b225f_2