In Defense of Remarketing

Well, that's constructive

Seen tonight in my feed: a "Green Eggs and Ham" style illustration sequence, from a UK content provider, of how everyone hates remarketing.

Sigh. Well, once more into the fray, dear friends.

First off, the linguist in me hates the laziness. If you make universal generalizations about people in any grouping, you are on the express train to Idiot Town, and that train is making no stops. Doing the same thing with a business practice is no better. Be more exact in your ranting.

Secondly, the sentiment it fails on the metrics. If people hated remarketing more than untargeted advertising, it would not be a business, let alone a multiplier on performance metrics. Feel free to slip in the old adage of the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. Higher performance is not consistent with hate, especially in a maturing market.

Next, the statement assumes that all remarketing is executed the same, or that the practice is such a universal commodity that it can be summed up without any kind of qualifier in regards to creative execution, publisher mix, dynamic recs, and so on. I would argue that if you are remarketing the same for 0 to 3 day as you might 3 to 7, 7 to 14, 14 to 30 and 30+... well, that's remarketing that everyone should hate. Because no one should like to see money left on the table, let alone a sledgehammer approach to brand and offer awareness. (Small aside: why is it OK to see a million replays of the same ad offline, but not online? Ah, right, branding.) If you can honor where your prospect is in the buying cycle, you should. Any competent remarketer should let you do that.

And finally... well, this is something of a good news moment, because it avoids a problem that has been plaguing display ads, especially in RTB platforms, but to hate remarketing, you have to see it. Which means the ads are not appearing below the fold, on bot sites, or to hacked machines where it all adds up to Not Seen By A Human Traffic.

Nevertheless, let us take away the core of the complaint, and edit it to something that is more accurate. Many people are annoyed by remarketing. That's something we can all agree on, right? Well, actually, not me, because it falls back into the status quo issue. To wit... no one is bothered by untargeted ads with weak frequency, because no one notices those ads in the first place. And we're back to that indifference moment.

Remarketing ads, when they are noticed, work because they are graphically relevant to the user. If the advertiser is executing beyond a static and sad level (i.e., no variation on recency), they can easily deliver different offers and dynamic products, and potentially delight a user that was on the fence, or now finding a better deal. When they do not work, it is because the user is out of cycle for the advertiser, but the remarketing / RTB buyer does not know enough to turn off the frequency. (Also, that the industry has not done enough to publicize how Ghostery watermarks work to turn off a campaign. Top right logo mark, folks. Takes two clicks and five seconds. Compare that to getting off someone's telemarketing or direct mail list. Even an unsub from an email list is slow in comparison.)

Sure, there are issues. Having items show on shared screens, or in sensitive categories, can be inconvenient and embarrassing. There is a threat to profit margins for vendors when we teach price-shopper consumers to always abandon the cart and look for the remarketing ads with a discount. All of these concerns are valid and legitimate, and will eventually shake out as companies that are more efficient consolidate the industry. We are not in the final flower of remarketing, just as we are not in the final flower of online advertising.

Remarketing is progress from what marketers could do before. It is a step up in revenue for publishers. It is a step up in relevance for consumers. Progress is almost never smooth and perfect, but it is, well, an overall good thing.

And hating progress is, well, hateful.

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Speaking of progress, I'd like you to move forward and connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the quote box at top right.

In addition to copywriting, direction and strategy, we also provide design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. Tell us what you need done, and your budget, and we'll work out an RFP.

3 Common Lead Generation Tactics That Never Work

Big Whammy

As a direct marketing pro, I love tests. Settling for a control is just a missed opportunity, and so long as you are making sure the analysis has statistical significance and you are measuring for the right outcomes (hint: not just clicks!), we are golden. Sometimes, literally.

Some tests are better than others, of course, in that they lead to a next stage that is more actionable. But in my time in email, static banners and dynamic ad units, over thousands of campaigns and tens of thousands of individual pieces of creative, there have been a few consistent stone cold losers, so much so that I cannot, in good conscience, even encourage the use of a test cell on them.

So, steer away from…

1) Better Business Bureau style seals of approval.

First off, many consumers do not know what these logos mean, and the logos usually do not minimize well, so it is difficult to get legibility without devoting a significant number of pixels to them.

Secondly, the approval seal tends to fall into the realm of false positive – which is to say, overcoming an objection to buy that might not have even been in the prospect’s mind in the first place. In overcoming the objection, the negative is brought up, and overwhelms the benefit.

Finally, there are the results – consistent losers of up to 20% or more in multiple consumer categories and metrics, at varying levels of importance.

I understand why you might be proud of an endorsement, or work in a consumer category where reassurance seems like it might be a lead generation practice, or competitive separation. But I’ve never seen it work, and I’m not really counting the days until it does.

2) Showing how to pay.

When it comes to e-commerce on lead gen, devoting significant real estate to credit card logos and wallet approaches is a tacit admission that you have two problems. The first is that you need the familiarity of a well-known logo to make your brand look legitimate, and the second is that you are hoping for an immediate, impulse-level purchase to carry the day. Neither is a very powerful statement to make in lead generation, and dulls the impact of your pitch.

Lead generation is rarely also lead fulfillment for paid ventures. Trying to close the deal on first communication is putting the cart before the horse. When it has been tried, it’s usually by brands who are lacking in other things to sell. In my experience, you are better off with selling copy, images, or even just more white space or a smaller piece.

3) Removing the call to action.

Sometimes you get a brand marketing play, or high e-commerce campaign, that wants to protect the brand to the point of not having anything so gauche as a button or click point. After all, everyone knows how to respond, and your audience is advanced enough that you can spend pixels in a better way, right?

Well, no.

It is possible that your distribution is poor enough that performance does not go down too much by removing the lack of a call to action element. (Which would make me wonder, well, why you are working with a network that cannot get you better distribution. Moving on. ) You may also see similar performance from a more subtle element, different language, or even icons instead of copy. This point is not meant to argue for oversized buttons regardless of offer, brand, or prospect demographic.

However, I have never seen performance improve, and do not really expect it to, for pure branding pieces that seem above response. Since it more or less flies into the face of direct marketing experience, dating back to the early days of the industry, either offline or digital. You need to ask, if you want the prospect to do something. The platform does not change that.

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Speaking of asking, mine is that you connect with me on LinkedIn, email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP box at the top right of this page.

In addition to copywriting, direction and strategy, we also provide design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. Tell us what you need done, and your budget, and we'll work out an RFP.

Hype(r) Targeting Ads

Does Not Seem Very Selly To Me

There's an odd little prank that's been making the rounds of Reddit recently. In it, a marketing pro does a concept exercise to see if he can do a Facebook campaign to an audience of one -- that one being his roommate. Using personal information of issues and interests about his target, the pro makes copy-specific creative and launches. Said roommate notices the ads, posts to his stream about how creeped out he is by this, and pulls out of Facebook before the prank can be revealed.

The short lesson from this is, of course, do not take a marketing pro for a roommate. Or, at least, not this one. The longer lesson is a little more actionable for our purposes.

Some background. I've been at three different high impact adtech companies, and while all of them were smart enough to avoid personally identifiable information (aka, PII, or the thing that ad tech companies never want to have, for reasons that Rhyme With Beagle), that didn't prevent us from making strong claims about how great our data was. And, by the power of inference, how you would have to suffer with less if you used our competitors.

Need to reach someone the instant that they were about to buy from a competitor? Three start ups ago had just the thing, with 100% deliverability and viewability in a proprietary ad format. How about doing the deed in dedicated emails where you were more polite, but had high control on frequency? That was two start ups ago, with high legal compliance and all kinds of auxiliary programs to make sure you were on the side of the angels. Want to not just reach, but deepen the lifetime value through showing additional SKUs that were certain to delight your prospect and make the cart size bigger? That was the last start up, and those recs would follow you around the Web like a bloodhound if the spend was high enough. And so on, and so on. Ad Tech Land is not exactly shy about telling you how truly wonderful their data is, and how the targeting makes a marketer's life far more lucrative and rewarding.

And yet, as you might guess from my current professional standing of not working for any of those guys, many campaigns at all of these stops would underperform, especially when you factored in ROI metrics that take into account higher spends to reach that juicy audience. How do you fix it? There are a lot of ways, from simple analysis of creative to see if the blocking and tackling (calls to action, entry points, etc.) was up to snuff. Testing the offer to see if it was truly right for the brand. Varying by daypart, platform, recency, and so on. Changing bid levels or payment methods. There's a lot of options, but sometimes targeting is not enough. Brand, offer and list trump creative, and always will.

But if you are very far apart from an acceptable ROI threshold on v1, for whatever reason, you'll never get the chance to iterate your way to tolerable. No client wants to hear that the things that can't easily be fixed -- their brand and, likely offer -- are at fault more than the targeting. And before you fold your tent and just blame the list anyway, some clients will try to complete the Hail Mary pass by making the art "stronger" with downright creepy and over-the-top targeting copy or imagery.

So, for the benefit of those about to waste good time after bad... your potential future customers do not now, and have not ever, cared about your efforts to put together a great list. Telling them about such things is pointless at best, and when you combine that sort of thing with cyber-creepy copy ("Still interested?" "We miss you!" "You forgot this!"), it not only irritates the prospect, it can also harm the brand. Oh, and it doesn't generally work in control cells against other executions, and if you do this kind of thing often enough, you can easily train a client base to wait until after a cart abandon to get a margin-crushing price. It's not easy to make retargeting a bad idea, but it can be done.

I've had any number of clients that felt compelled to tell the prospects of how special the targeting was to reach them, or how long it's been since they were on site, or why they are getting this offer now. Sometimes, they even go through with it despite my strong recommendation not to, and at that point, we're in the realm of my special Law of Dumb Clients. Which is: "If a client is going to do a dumb thing, and you've told them why it's a dumb thing, and they insist on doing it anyway... do the dumb thing *quickly*, while getting their payment ASAP, because they will be out of business soon enough from doing dumb things."

Anyway, back to the creepy text and selects. Beyond the ethics and lack of efficiency, if your list choices are tight enough, you can't scale. (And congrats, by the way, on finding an online advertising method that doesn't scale. That takes talent.) If you tell the prospect what you know about them, you are wasting everyone's time and being off-putting.

Instead, give your super-targeted list a different offer. Make the creative execution more about the SKU in question. Add a one-time coupon code and clock to redemption. Give them a price break at higher spend levels. Link to testimonials, social media plays or other reasons that would get someone over the last mile. And give them the option of a fine sausage dinner, rather than a documentary on how it's made. You'll both eat, and sleep, much better afterwards.

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You have read this far, so feel free to connect with me onLinkedIn. I also welcome email to davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or you can hit the quote box at the top right of this page.

In addition to copywriting, direction and strategy, we also provide design, illustration, photography, coding and hosting. Tell us what you need done, and your budget, and we'll work out an RFP.