The Lost Art Of The Mid-Range (Retargeting) Game

Jerry West, AKA The Logo

Longtime readers of the blog may remember my fondness and long-term enthusiasm for the NBA. With this year's Finals nearly upon us, I started thinking a little about the game, and how one aspect of it relates to digital marketing.

In the past few years, professional basketball has seen a radical change in tactics, with teams getting better at and taking more long three point shots. With the area that teams have to defend extended, the other most efficient offensive tactic, high percentage two point shots from close in, gets easier to achieve.

So the goal is three pointers and dunks, and what has been steadily beaten out of the game is the long 2-point shot, known as the mid-range game. By the numbers, it's a losing proposition, since it goes in about as much as the three-pointer and is, of course, 50% less valuable. Take enough long twos, it's presumed, and you are most likely going to lose.

But if you watch the actual games, rather than just the statistics, what will you see deciding the outcome in close contests? More often than not, it's the unloved long two. Because it's the shot that you can take when everything else has been taken away, with the defense guarding the arc and the paint. And when the difference between teams is close, whether or not you make those shots may be the difference between winning and losing.

The corollary to the mid-range game in digital advertising is mid-term retargeting. For the most part, short term retargeting is settled law. You dynamically populate the item that was abandoned into your ad unit, maybe goose it with a sale price or shipping offer, and create the digital advertising equivalent of a post-it note to remind users to complete an action.

Long-term retargeting is less settled, but also usually a done deal. You shock the user with a previously unseen, presumably very aggressive, offer. Perhaps you give them ultimatum copy that tells them they are being opted out of offers. The difference in branding will be strong enough to provoke a reaction, and so long as you are taking seasonality and working from good data in terms of estimating the buying cycle, the tactic should work to re-start the weaker parts of your funnel. Or maybe you just send them your best acquisition ad, and consider the retargeting behavior no longer valid.

But what should you do with the leads that are no longer white hot, nor ice cold? Assuming your impression count and due diligence are up to the task of having mid-range ads in the first place, you generally use an expanded set of items, and maybe mix in search functionality, soft sell content, or a social media play to get the leads re-engaged.

But all of these suppositions are just that -- theories that marketers use to add meaning and rules of the road to a churning universe that can seem devoid of consistent best practices.

Mostly because many funnel strategies in retargeting make the assumption that the prospects have seen and thought about every step of the creative work to date, because the marketers themselves certainly have. (If you want to throw some philosophy at this, the Naturalistic Fallacy applies.)

So the best tactics to use in mid-term retargeting... usually start with making absolutely sure about viewability and list quality, to prove that this specific market exists in the first place. (Hint: it might not.)

Then, test a lot of the suppositions that you've been treating as settled law, and let the data drive.

And if you still need a coach?

Well, M&AD has watched an awful lot of games and seen an awful lot of data. Let's play.

A Brief Longing For The Busy Signal

Nope. Nope. Nope.

The other day, I heard one of my favorite rock songs by the British recording artist Richard Thompson. It's "Tear Stained Letter" ( here's the link to the live version), which dates back to 1983. It contains the following lyric:

I went for the phone, but the line was busy

Which got me to thinking about busy signals. They were a constant, universal and dreaded factor in everyday life that has more or less just gone away due to technology.

Busy signals used to be a very big deal. You'd dread getting them, worry about being on the phone too long and giving one to someone else, get very frustrated with whatever entity was causing it, and so on. As phone tech improved, we moved on to call waiting, and getting straight to voicemail, and at this point, voicemail is pretty much a lost art as well. If you want to reach anyone under the age of 25, text or their preferred social network is pretty much becoming your only channel, especially with the scourge of robo-calling.

But I want to get back to what the busy signal represented. There was a democracy to them. Rich and poor, urgent and trivial, the busy signal was a simple and complete hard stop to whatever the caller thought was important and had to happen right now now now. If you couldn't figure out some other way to solve your problem, your only option was to redial or wait.

Maybe really wealthy people had other options - private lines and such - but for the most part, it was a shared and universal inconvenience. At any point in the day, you had the means to immediately communicate with the person you wanted to talk to, but there was a really good chance it wasn't going to work. The busy signal encouraged back up plans, alternatives. Creativity.

Now, of course, the call goes through, but with less of a chance of success. Maybe it goes straight to voicemail. Or blocked. You can send email, but there's no guarantee it won't trigger a spam filter or get buried under other messages. What used to be an absolute and mechanical disconnect is now set to the preference of the recipient, who holds all of the power. They decide whether to answer the call or not from the information they receive on their screen.

I think this means that we talk to each other less than we used to, but there's really no way to know for certain. Perhaps we are all just busier now, less apt to do the small reach of making the first call, more prone to cultivating our feeds and inboxes and to do lists.

No one wants the busy signal back, of course, and it's never coming back. Good tech always displaces bad.

But that doesn't mean that when it went away, we didn't lose something as well.

AI, Paper Clips and Criteo Boxes

All Hail The Criteo Overlords

This is going to get pretty esoteric pretty quickly, but I think it will get to a place that's helpful to marketing and advertising folks. Let's dig in.

In a recent interview on NPR's Fresh Air, Bill McKibben spoke about his latest book, where he outlined threats to humanity. (Mostly, spoiler alert, climate change.) At the tail end of the talk, McKibben also noted the threat posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI), loosely defined as computers making decisions based on a virtuous learning loop built on data accumulation and analysis.

McKibben did so with a fairly famous thought exercise known as the Paperclip Problem, or to get more high faluting, instrumental convergence. In this, an AI robot with a seemingly good but unbounded mission (say, the most efficient manufacture of paperclips) would quickly move to terminate its human masters, since they would likely shut off the robot at some future point, and thereby prevent paperclips from being made.

Now, at this point, you might be wondering how we're getting to digital advertising challenges. And with that, I give you the Criteo Box, which is a term that some in our field use to describe template retargeting ads made (in)famous by the dominant player in the space, Criteo. (Example above.)

Criteo boxes are loathed by many design and brand marketing professionals, because they are machine and data driven utilitarian shopping bots that seem to eliminate the need for design. The challenge becomes all about the dynamic product recommendations shown in the ads, because by whatever analytic standard is being used to determine good ads from bad, the data has driven you to this, the final plateau of performance.

An inelegant bare bones box with as many recs as you can fit, Because Data.

Which might lead you to think that design doesn't matter, because it's been solved by AI. Like betting that you will win in chess against IBM's Watson, it's a losing proposition. Just accept the box and move on, with the small possible caveat that it's only solved for remarketing and not acquisition. (But will also likely be solved at some point for acqusition, again, Because Data.)

But here's where I'd like to hold out hope for humanity's continued presence in my life's work, while still being OK with analytics. My belief is that the Criteo Box is only dominant due to an over-reliance on short term goal events.

If you are judging only by clicks, an ad with multiple entry points and good dynamic SKUs might always win over something more brand related. (Side note: please don't use clicks as your goal event, as it's really a bad idea due to bad actors and fat fingering on mobile, and it's not 2001. Tangent over.)

But what if you were looking at, say, purchases? Or the lifetime value of the consumer? Or the margins driven from that value? Or...

Well, you get the point.

The reason why we don't judge ads by these longer funnel approaches is because no advertiser is going to run just display ads. They are also going to follow up with email, have a social and native presence, perform work in search engine optimization for paid and native, and upsell the user on site. All of which will have impact on the performance of the ads, and possibly not an equal one.

In addition, advertisers are going to rise or fall based on customer service, their offline presence, print and broadcast and podcast and heaven knows what else. (Oh, and a side note? Advertisers don't exist in a vacuum without competition, and if everyone in your space is making nothing but Criteo Boxes, your non-Criteo Box ad is likely going to stand out. And, perhaps, perform better.)

Because life is about a lot more than paperclips. Strong performance practices are rarely so cut and dried as to be about a single factor or a single metric. Things that you think you know probably need to be re-tested, and re-thought, rather than assumed to be settled law.

People who design ads without consulting the data are, I believe, acting in an irresponsible manner to their clients.

But so are the ones that act only from data, rather than be inspired by it.

(Also, beating Criteo Box controls? Not a new trick for me. Reach out and let's talk.)