The Retargeting Playbook

The South of France, March 2006. Nine people are seated around a private pool. There is excited chatter. They are reminiscing about their shared time at university, a decade earlier. But one person has yet to emerge from the rented villa. He is lying in a bath. The same bath he lowered himself into over an hour earlier. He is reading, intensely. Reading the Mordkovich brothers’ best-selling book on Pay Per Click Marketing. And as he continues to read, he knows he is going to change career.

Eight years ago a book on paid search was the catalyst that inspired my move from traditional broadcast to digital media. And I like to think that if I had taken ‘The Retargeting Playbook’ away with me, the result would have been the same.

Remarketing, that is the art of of targeting previous visitors to your site with marketing messages, is a powerful technique, but not a new one. Many early networks used browser plugins to piggyback on other sites, essentially stealing advertising revenue from publishers. Today, although a few rogue networks still exist, the power (and ad revenue) is very much with respectable, established networks who give a fair share of revenue to the sites that carry their ads. In return, these networks have access to almost all display inventory available on the web through near-instantaneous programmatic ad buying. Good for them, even better for marketers.

‘The Retargeting Playbook’, co-written by the President, VP of Marketing, and Head of Product at remarketing ad platform AdRoll, purports to be the essential guide to remarketing in 2014. If we put aside the fact that email remarketing, and especially search remarketing are given fairly short shrift and instead reframe this book as an attempt at writing the essential guide to display remarketing in 2014, then the authors have largely succeeded.

The authors guide the reader through the evolution of display advertising, the basics of campaign creation and tactical considerations, the democratising effect of real-time bidding on media buying, the difficulties in effective mobile retargeting, and some more advanced tips for different types of advertiser. Facebook retargeting also gets a substantial look in, with an evaluation of the characteristics and performance of the various ad units on offer. So far, so great.

What this book is not is a comprehensive display advertising primer. The authors assume a basic level of familiarity with display and appear to have written the book for marketing managers and CMOs who are looking to expand on their existing contextual and demographically targeted ad buys.

In addition, this tight focus on retargeting means that some important aspects of display advertising are given less attention. The chapter on banner creative, in many ways the key to a successful display campaign, is a mere 15 pages long. Given that AdRoll has 15,000 clients and an enviable data set to draw upon, this is a missed opportunity.

And yet the major flaw in the book is that it is written from the perspective of a company with a vested interest in championing a certain style of remarketing. For example, the authors take time out to attack popular pay-for-performance models of ad network remuneration, championing instead the pay-for-exposure CPM model. This is coincidentally the only model that AdRoll appears to offer. Similarly, email remarketing is dismissed as being right for 'big boys only' based on the low open rates enjoyed by most email marketers. However, given that display advertising clickthrough rates are usually mere fractions of a percentage this is a little rich. Equally, market leaders like Criteo and Rocket Fuel are only mentioned in reference to their profit margins, not their stellar returns for advertisers, or even their important place in today’s retargeting ecosystem. This does the reader a disservice and devalues the content in the book.

In summary, ‘The Retargeting Playbook’ is a very good remarketing primer and an excellent introduction to the concepts driving display advertising today. However, the reader should also remember, before they leap into creating their first campaign, that this book contains an inherent bias towards AdRoll’s own offering. Perhaps another book will be needed to complete the picture - but then, who takes two books into the bath?

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