Re-targeting Technology - "The Pants That Stalked Me on the Web"

By -
The Pants That Stalked Me on the Web - Advertising Age - DigitalNext
"I surfed over to my favorite apparel website, Zappos, now a part of Amazon.

After a few clicks, Zappos' recommendation engine went to work and started offering me the selections that people who looked at the same shorts I did ultimately bought -- a cool idea and a feature that has been useful to me in the past.

Then, I abandoned the search and did something else. That's when the weirdness started.

In the five days since, those recommendations have been appearing just about everywhere I've been on the web, including MSNBC, Salon, CNN.com and The Guardian. The ad scrolls through my Zappos recommendations: Hurley, Converse by John Varvatos, Quicksilver, Rip Curl, Volcom. Whatever. At this point I've started to actually think I never really have to go back to Zappos to buy the shorts -- no need, they're following me."

That story might sound creepy at first. But I find the technology both fascinating and a great tool for marketers. Have a look at Criteo, who are behind the technology. Here's how it works.



This is like AdWords on steroids... and marketers should definitely see better ROI. Because you already know the prospect has shown interest, as opposed to just randomly displaying ads based on the content he's currently browsing. And user stories such as the one above prove that the technology works in the real world ;)


Comments

Kate said…
Hi Tyrell,
Kathryn here- marketing associate at AdRoll.com. I totally agree that the technology behind retargeting is a wonderful opportunity. Helping consumers understand the idea behind it is pivotal to success and growth in the future. I, for one, love seeing ads about products and services I am actually interested in. However, I know there is a lot of concern over shoppers being stalked by ads, and here at AdRoll we never want to harass customers! Check out our blog if you're interested: http://bit.ly/a4nLTI. We love hearing your input! Thanks!
4:10 AM
Tyrell said…
Kathryn,

As I mentioned at the start of my post, this technology potentially can be viewed as creepy. But then again, there is no real privacy on the internet is there? Look at facebook for instance. And I know Google's AdSense reads my e-mail to display ads that match the content of the mail that I'm reading. The list goes on..

However, I do agree with you that there should be standards and best practices addressing privacy, especially for advertising technologies.

Thanks for your input!
7:30 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Old Engineer and the Hammer

By -
Image
This parable is an old one. I told this last week to one of my team members at work and wanted to find the original. Since this is an old parable, I found different versions of this story over the Internet. In some versions the story revolves around a broken down ship, while in others a large machine in a factory. The version I'm quoting below is what I remember reading ages ago. It's 2019. I'm turning 40 this year. The first time someone paid me money to write code was back in early 2003. This means that my career also turned 16, going on 17 this year. As a senior staff member, I do find myself championing the value of skills and expertise in software engineering, especially to young graduates doing their rotation in my software engineering team. This old parable stuck somewhere in my head all those years ago. I still think it's the best parable told about the value of expertise and staying sharp. I hope it serves someone else as it does me ...   A gian
Read more

An overnight success, 10 years in the making ....

By -
Image
“An overnight success is ten years in the making.”   ― Tom Clancy, Dead or Alive ---- I haven't written a long form blog post in a while. So I thought I'd post an update here on what I've been working on during my absence. Hope you enjoy the read! I picked this title for a good reason too. Sometimes, for the casual onlooker, an innovation might seem like magic, or worse, trivial. As an engineer, my first response to such onlookers would be... "if that's the case, try to do it yourself... overnight!". A more useful response would be to get them to read my previous post about The Old Engineer and the Hammer .  ---- The focus of this post is an API Orchestrator I built a couple of years ago (that's 2018, in case you are reading this from a far future date, from a colony in Mars).  We initially started calling it the Service Domain Manager. However, we eventually decided Cloud Domain Manager describes the specific area of the business it belongs to, better th
Read more

10 years on, #Blockchain is ready for Business use... thanks to the #Hyperledger project!

By -
Image
Note: This isn’t a Bitcoin hedging post. In fact, that was the last occurrence of that word in this article. Is the Blockchain hype over? According to this year’s Gartner Hype Cycle , Blockchain has crossed the peak of unrealistic expectations and is now heading towards the trough of disillusionment. This usually means that we’ll stop hearing about Blockchain being the cure for world hunger, and instead will start hearing about real world case studies that demonstrate its use cases. I tend to agree with Gartner’s prediction of Blockchain reaching the plateau of profitability, and therefore wider adoption in the enterprise within the next 5 years . Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies - July 2017 Blockchain for Business? Fundamentally, Blockchain emerged from business principles that has been around since humans started trading with each other. We have incrementally digitised parts of this process over the past century. However, this digitisation proces
Read more