On December 27th, 2011, Jay Habegger spoke on Minnesota Public Radio.
“I see it as being a somewhat under-the-radar trend for the next couple of years,” he said. But in three to five years, the ad industry will wake up and say, “Oh my gosh, some significant percentage of the digital spend is now being spent in media outlets that nobody would have considered a media outlet today.”
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“Online retail, by its very definition, exists so that companies can sell products and turn a profit on those sales. The model has grown steadily over the past decade as consumers become increasingly comfortable purchasing goods online. But savvier online retailers aren’t merely consumer-facing stores anymore; they’re evolving into media companies that can sell advertising and profit off their audience. In the process, they are creating a myriad of new digital co-operative marketing opportunities for themselves and their suppliers.”
OwnerIQ CEO Jay Habegger is currently featured on the cover of AdAge.com for his article “Why Amazon is About to Become a Force in Online Advertising”.
“Amazon flew under the radar in late June when it announced it was entering the world of advertising by using its consumer data to deliver targeted advertising on third-party sites across the web, but it’s big news for online retailers and advertisers.”
by Jay Habegger
I had the honor of participating in a panel at the OMMA 2011 Global Conference last week in San Francisco. The panel, organized and moderated by Cory Treffiletti of CatalystSF, was entitled The Re-Targeting Re-volution: How Has Retargeting Changed Over The Last Year?
Besides me, the panel included representatives from Criteo, ChoiceStream, Media6Degrees, and Turn. Cory asked us as part of our preparation call to think about a few key take-away points that we could leave with the audience. As a group I hope we were able to do that.
From my perspective, here are two key thoughts about how retargeting has changed and its role in the media-mix.
Exchange Inventory & RTB Make Retargeting Much More Scalable
The growth in the volume of display inventory being transacted on exchanges and through Real-Time-Bidding (RTB) has enabled retargeting to be much more scalable. Since, by my definition, retargeting is about using data gathered about the visitors to your own web property and messaging them again at advertising supported websites, there are fundamentally two choke points to making retargeting work. First, you are limited by the volume of traffic coming to your web site. Secondly, you are limited by how many of the people that do come to your website that you can message again.
There isn’t much you can do about the first limitation; it is pretty fundamental. You simply can’t retarget more people than you see (all forms of look-alike modeling not withstanding). However, the second limitation, how many of the people you tagged could you message again, used to be limited by the reach of the ad network you happened to be working with. As more display inventory finds its way to the exchanges, that second limitation is going away. Most meaningful players can see a wide swath of the same inventory and thus have access to more retargeting opportunities. The result is that more retargeting messages can be displayed and occupy a larger portion of the media mix.
Re-Targeting is For All Advertisers – NOT Just ETailers!
Retargeting has been looked on as primarily something that etailers do to convert the people who abandon online shopping carts, or pitch an offer on a product that was just viewed. Most of my fellow panelists really focused on this application of re-targeting. To be sure, retargeting is absolutely useful for this important marketing objective.
But, to confine retargeting to this role is like saying that that a broad-based technique like search marketing is useful only for retailers. It just isn’t so.
Retargeting is about taking a web browser that has already exhibited a degree of interest in your offering and messaging them again in order to nurture them along the marketing process. For a manufacturer that sells through the channel, this next step could be directing them to a channel partner, or even just staying in the consideration set. For a B2B client, retargeting could be about getting an interested person to take that next step and download a white paper. In both cases, retargeting is an important tool in the online marketer’s tool-kit for furthering engagement.
In fact, I’ve taken this idea a bit further in my post on online marketing Go-WEST, where I make the case that retargeting is one of the four essential pillars of any modern online marketing program.
Again, thanks to my fellow panelists and especially to Cory for a great experience!
By J. Habegger
The Wall Street Journal published another installment in their What They Know series on Monday, 7 March 2011. This article is about how companies are targeting video advertising using data compiled about consumer viewing habits from set-top boxes and linking that with off-line data based on the fact that the cable company has a billing relationship.
“TV’s Next Wave: Tuning In To You”
The part about this story that I find the most interesting is that it makes the concern about online behavioral targeting using cookie data look like a tempest in a teapot compared to the management of personal data in other realms, specifically by off-line marketers and, in this article, by the new technology of targeted video advertising. I’ve written before on how online cookie targeted behavioral targeting is one of the advertising regimes that most highly respects consumer privacy.
My argument is based on the fact that most cookie-based advertising is anonymous, there is notice on each website about what is happening and that that consumers can easily identify and delete cookies at any time. Consumers are in full control of the data on their web usage; if they don’t want advertisers to use this information, they have the absolute last word on the matter: just delete cookies. On top of that, as an industry, we provide easy opt-outs that make it easy tell us that you don’t want cookies placed.
Taking notice even further, the industry now has Advertising Choice that actually allows a user to tell when a particular ad is being behaviorally targeted, and the industry trade association, the IAB, has rolled out Network and Exchange quality assurance guidelines.
Ok, now compare and contrast that with the treatment of the information being used to target video advertising as described by the Wall Street Journal.
First up, by and large, advertising targeted with cookies cannot be readily connected with off-line data about you. It’s usually anonymous. In the case of cookie targeting, the advertiser knows that a computer with a particular identification number browsed a particular website. But, we usually don’t know the address of that person or their name. Cable television companies using your viewing data always know your name and address. Every program a consumer watches can be connected with the precise household doing the watching, and this fact can be linked into any online database through the last name and address.
Next, data on my viewing habits is being collected without my knowledge and without any reasonable way for me to directly control what data is being collected or used. There is no privacy policy linked to each show I watch. Most importantly, unlike cookies that I can delete at any time I choose with a few mouse clicks, there is no way for me to exercise direct control and delete data collected by the set-top box. Unlike online ad-targeting using cookies, there is no way I can control whether or not I participate in video targeting.
So, I have to rely on the opt-out provided by the cable company. Since I can’t control it directly, how do I opt out of my viewing data being collected? Unlike online advertisers using cookie data, which typically provide a link to an opt-out site that can be simply clicked to opt-out, opting out of video targeting of ads to your television requires actually calling a particular customer service number of your cable provider! I don’t know what your experience has been with cable call centers, but I suspect it isn’t radically different from mine. So, to opt-out you have to call in to a cable company customer service phone queue and wait. According to the Wall Street Journal article, Charter Communications doesn’t even provide that level of customer service; you can’t opt out.
What’s the bottom line? Despite all the rhetoric surrounding online behavioral targeting and privacy, the consumer privacy controls are not only good, but better than consumers have in most other realms. If you want to see a true privacy problem, look no further than the handling of consumer off-line data or, now, data collected by cable companies for one-to-one video targeting. Not anonymous. No notice. No control. Unreasonable opt out. Now that’s what I call a privacy problem.
