Monday, August 9th, 2010
by Crystal deGoede*
Retargeting – when online targeted advertising is delivered to consumers based on previous Internet actions that did not result in a past conversion – has become more importunate (persistent) as we continue to increasingly use the Internet to shop, order food, book travel, monitor the news or for pretty much anything you want to do without leaving the house.
It is also becoming more widely used within the advertising arena. With so many similar 
brands in the market it is hard to differentiation yourself from the other guy, and this form of remarketing can help to successfully convert those lost opportunities.
This past week Michael Learmonth, digital lead at Advertising Age expressed his creepy experience with Zappos, and “The Pants That Stalked [Him] on the Web.”
Oddly enough, after reading Learmonth’s post I was having dinner with my friend Nancy who was “weirded out” by a similiar experience. Ever since she booked a room at Loews Hotel ads for the hotel began appearing on every website that she visited. She is a sales trader so PPC (pay-per-click), Twitter, retargeting, and cookies are not really in her vocabulary. So I thought it would be interesting to research if retargeting is as effective as marketing and advertising professionals believe and how it actually works.
According to Criteo, a company that specializes in scalable personalized retargeting, more than 90 percent of website visitors leave before converting (i.e., making a purchase, downloading a white paper, etc.) Other research has shown that it can take at least seven follow-up emails or phone calls with prospects to actual convert them to a sale. If we are only tracking those visitors that convert on our physical websites, we are simply losing out on a possible sale down the road. Websites these days are optimized for search and have the technology to place cookies on each visitor’s computers to measure the site’s true audience size, but that is only capturing IP addresses most of the time. Then they have us, until we remove all our cookies and empty our cache.
So how do these retargeting customized ads work? When a prospect/client browses your website they become tagged with a snippet of code, which tracks which products they have shown interest in. When they leave the website and begin visiting other pages that’s when the retargeting begins. Banner ads customized to their search on your site start appearing on sites all over the web, from news, social networks, blogs, etc.
Companies that are using retargeting firms, such as Fetchback, in their marketing strategy have seen a 592 percent increase in ROI and conversions up by 94 percent. There are many other benefits to this form of behavioral marketing. It helps streamline all of your campaigns and the frequency of the ads helps keep your brand on the top of prospects minds. (Most services have an integrated feature that allows you to place a limit on the frequency at which the ads appear, so you don’t bomb your potential clients and “creep” them out because everywhere they go they see you.)
Plus, your ads are not static on a particular site related to your industry, which usually does not yield a lot of traffic because that market is already saturated and are either already your clients or know who you are. With retargeting your ads you are only reengaging with new prospects that have already shown interest in your brand; you can focus on what their needs are and manage your ROI.
In short, retargeting helps build your brand and online presence, while increasing the chances of reengaging your audience. It is not going to convert all on its own and has to be used with traditional marketing tactics to be effective. So don’t eliminate your current strategies. It is also important to measure the effectiveness of your retargeting campaigns, ensuring it is worth the investment and that your conversion rates are higher.
This article from Inc. Magazine highlights a retargeting success story involving Scottevest and its partnership with firm AdRoll.
There is one downside to the growing popularity for converting leads more efficiently via retargeting and that is the possibility that people may have the choice to opt-out (a do not call list for the Internet) of all behavioral targeting ads. What does that do for brands that are following the rules and not hunting down prospects on the web? We lose the opportunity to generate qualified leads for our sales team and revenue for the company. If you do use retargeting make sure you limit your reach frequency because when people begin to feel harassed and stalked by brands they will opt-out; I would.
Is your organization taking on the strategy of retargeting advertising? If so, how successful have you been with campaigns and reengaging lost prospects? Do you think we should have the right to opt-out of all behavioral targeting ad campaigns or just the irritating ones? Please share your thoughts and ideas with me and the BurrellesLuce Fresh Ideas readers.
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Posted in Advertising/Marketing, Public Relations, Technology | 3 Comments »
Friday, July 2nd, 2010
by Lauren Shapiro*
Flickr Image: kbaird; Original Image: Charlie Riedel / AP
British Petroleum has been making front page news since April 22nd as approximately 800,000 gallons of oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico each day. BP was once an organization thought to be a “friendly brand in the oil business” – despite its previous disasters. But as the oil continues to spill into the summer months, and according to government officials into the fall, BP is being scrutinized now more than ever.
One might assume that companies that specialize in goods/services, particularly those that could potentially wreak havoc on the safety of the world’s inhabitants, would have a well prepared protocol for crisis situations. Furthermore, if the company had a predecessor that experienced a similar crisis (i.e., Exxon Valdez, 1989) they would sculpt this protocol by learning from the mistakes previously made. It’s highly doubtful that BP did not have a crisis communication procedure in place, but was and is it a good one?
According to Chris Lehane, Newsweek’s master of disaster, “One of the rules of thumb of crisis management is that you can never put the genie back in the bottle in terms of what the underlying issue is. People evaluate you in terms of how you handle things going forward. And obviously doing everything to be open, transparent, accessible is the type of thing that the public does look for from a corporate entity in this type of situation.”
As the situation in the Gulf continues to unfold, BP has promised one solution after another with no success – in other words, they over promised and under delivered, a cardinal “no-no” in business or any crisis resolution. Lehane states, “If you tell people what you are going to do, and you suggest it’s going to be successful, you need to be successful. Because once you create those expectations and you don’t fulfill them, when you already have a significant credibility problem, it further degrades your credibility.”
BP’s inability to implement a successful solution to fix the spill isn’t the only thing affecting its credibility. BP came under fire during the U.S. Congressional hearings when executives from BP, Transocean, and Halliburton took turns blaming each other for the incident coined “the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.” And BP’s executives continue to make one public relations faux-pas after another: (more…)
Tags: 10 worst BP gaffes, authenticity, BP, brand, British Petroleum, BurrellesLuce, business, Carl-Henric Svanberg, Chris Lehane, credibility, crisis communications, crisis management, economy, environmental disaster, Exxon, Facebook yachting trip, Fresh Ideas, front page news, Gulf of Mexico, Halliburton, I want my life back, keywords, large oil companies, Lauren Shapiro, Louisiana, maelstrom, media relations 2.0, media training, Newsweek, oil spill, pay-per-click, PR, procedure, protocol, Public Relations, publicity, Randy Prescott, resolution, search engines, shrimp, small people, spokespeople, The Lens, Tony Hayward, Transocean, transparent, U.S. Congressional hearings, viral campaign
Posted in Advertising/Marketing, Media Monitoring, Media Outreach, Media Relations, News Coverage, Public Relations | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual report is once again upon us. As in the past, it confirms that the majority of us get our information online and that we do not want to pay for it, subscribe to it, or pay-per-click for an article.
The facts may be free, but getting them collected, edited, checked, and delivered to you online or otherwise still costs money. Like almost every else 
you do in this life, you do get what you pay for. The old joke of “hiring’em young while they still got all the answers” may work fine for opining in the blogosphere, but may not cut it in the “knock three times and tell’em Dan sent you” world of investigative journalism.
Then there is this little issue of legality. At the recent OnCopyright 2010 conference put together by the Copyright Clearance Center in New York City, a self-proclaimed investigative blogger lamented the chilling effect of the many defensive lawsuits filed against him. While we may be prejudiced against the larger media organizations at times, they can stand up to this type of intimidation. To preempt the criticism they vet their sources and data prior to publishing and if that’s not enough they have financial resources to support their position.
Back to free; the cry is that everything should be free on the Internet . . . Well it never has been and never will be. The content and information you get every day on the web is being paid for by somebody, usually advertisers. For lots of reasons we can look at later, this subsidy is just not cutting it.
So if we want reliable, vetted information we have to support its creation. In other words, we have to pay for it. The organizations that are creating vetted content are searching for a way to do this. There are a number of models being tried currently.
- The pay-wall which is in place at a number of sites and variations are being implemented by the Financial Times and the New York Times.
- The pay-by-article model for which you pay only for what you read á la iTunes.
- A central subscription service for many participating providers.
I believe all of these are doomed to fail. However, I do believe there is a fourth solution that could prove viable and consumer-friendly. It would be a hybrid of the pay-by-article model and the aggregated subscription combined with some as of yet unreleased technology.
Over the coming weeks, I look forward to examining more closely some of these monetization options and having a bit of discourse on the topic. In the interim, I strongly recommend that anyone whose livelihood, especially journalists and public relations professionals, is tied to media read the Pew Report. And share their thoughts with myself and the readers of BurrellesLuce Fresh Ideas.
Tags: advertisers, BurrellesLuce, central subscription service, content creation, Copyright, Copyright Clearance Center, financial resources, Financial Times, Fresh Ideas, Future of the media, investigative blogger, investigative journalism, iTunes, media, media organizations, OnCopyright 2010, online media, paid subscriptions, pay-per-article, pay-per-click, Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism Annual Report, Public Relations, State of the Media 2010, Subscription Wall, The New York Times
Posted in Copyright, Media Industry, Public Relations, Technology | 2 Comments »
