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 Or maybe you just send them your best acquisition ad, and consider the retargeting behavior no longer valid.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.