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It all started with my wedding dress.
I bought it on Modcloth. Not even a minute post-purchase, I started seeing ads for it around the web. Especially on Facebook.
Who the fuck needs to buy a second, exact same wedding dress right away?
Granted, it wasn’t marketed as a wedding dress — this was right before Modcloth released their wedding line — but it was a long, fancy, sequined champagne gown, the kind of piece that you really only need one of in a given six-week period. Which is about how long this dress internet-haunted me.
Everyone I know has a similar story about a big-ticket or one-time-only purchase that just never can say goodbye.
Aaron Shield, a college professor and my brother-in-law, bought a last-minute (no judgment) Valentine’s Day gift for his husband: an MVMT watch. Immediately after clicking the “Buy” button, Shield started seeing ads for it. “Everywhere,” he says. “Every website I went to. Social media. Facebook, Amazon, the New York Times, Politico. Basically, it was stalking me.” It’s May. He’s still seeing the ads.
Writer and world traveler Amna Shamim bought a North Face backpack in a store, a Dakine suitcase on Sierra Trading Post using Ebates, and a Longchamp handbag on the Bloomingdale’s website using Ebates, and immediately got hit with ads on sites like Facebook (“the most aggressive”), Amazon, Huffington Post, Forbes, and more. They began as soon as she started researching and didn’t let up for weeks post-purchase, “until I started browsing for something else they [could] put in front of my face ad nauseam,” she says. “Basically a few weeks at least.”
“I saw ads for a good three months after I bought a couch,” says Racked senior editor Alanna Okun. She bought it from West Elm, in the store, after extensive research. “It was only after I bought it that I started seeing ads for it all the time,” she says. “Why didn’t they know I’d bought it already?” Okun was actively shopping online for couch accoutrements — throw pillows, an ottoman, a coffee table. Why wouldn’t West Elm market those to her instead?
Okun puts a finer point on it: “It’s like an annoying ex who keeps texting you. I’m more aware of you, but it makes me want to ignore you even more.”
But WHY? Why must we live like this? Must we live like this?
I turned to MediaMath’s Matt Vaz for answers. MediaMath makes technology and offers services that help advertisers reach the customers they want to reach (perhaps you and me). Vaz is their senior specialist of programmatic strategy and optimization; he works on ad campaign performance. He has also been served ads for things he’d just bought (socks).
As it turns out, if Modcloth, West Elm, and the rest wanted to abstain from remarketing — also called retargeting — particular items to particular people, that would be easy enough. Vaz describes building a simple ad campaign that signals where a customer has been on a given website. The programming code creates, among other things, an invisible-to-the-naked-eye pixel on various site pages to signal when a customer has been to the homepage, category pages, shopping basket, and, finally — post-purchase — a thank-you page. “We need to have site pixels in order to serve ads... for the right recommendations to go into that ad, and the DCO [Dynamic Creative Optimization] agency needs that pixel for the right [content] recommendations to go into that ad,” he says. (DCO technology assesses who’s visiting a site and then serves them tailored ads on the fly.)
“We can provide a daily pixel report for clients to see,” Vaz explains. “Every day they can see how often [for example] the home page fired the prior day. If we saw a huge drop-off that wasn’t explained, then that would suggest to us that we need to change that pixel. Zero loads means the pixel isn’t there,.” He adds that some campaigns deliberately do not include thank-you page pixels. In the cases of these single-occasion or rare purchases, he observes that remarketing the purchased item “would seem... out of touch with the actual semantic backing of brand; that they don't understand what the brand is selling, that a wedding dress is a one-time purchase.” He suggests that such advertisers might need to have an additional conversation to flesh out a media plan that makes more sense to their customers.
What could different plans look like? Zack Abbell, senior director of e-commerce at Poppin, weighs in: “Retargeting programs come in all shapes and sizes. Some campaigns are driven by recently viewed products, and show a customer a 1:1 on what they viewed” — yep — “while others will show similar items to what was viewed. Both of these examples tend to utilize retargeting vendors’ algorithms on which products to show, the underlying recommendations engine, and formats that are most likely to drive a click- or view-through conversion.” (Conversion, in this parlance, means sale.)
Back to the tracking pixel for a second, though. One place where this can get complicated, Vaz notes, is if you shop for an item on different devices or different browsers. So if you’ve been making googly eyes at a Balmain leather moto jacket on your phone, then finally take the plunge on your laptop, you might keep seeing ads for it on your phone even after you’ve parted with your $3,000. (Buy me one too, while you’re at it.)
But! Even if you are looking at the same thing on the same platform all the time, according to Vaz, sometimes that pixel can accidentally come off a page post-testing, if someone’s tinkering with other parts of the code on that page. So what starts out working well can end up showing you an ad for that car you just bought. Again.
In these cases, where things seem to fall apart is amid the many entities involved in creating an ad campaign. I’ve worked in a bunch of marketing departments over the years and seen similar things myself: There’s the advertiser itself, plus perhaps a marketing agency, a creative agency, a digital agency, an SEO agency, a platform (such as MediaMath), a DCO agency, all joined by, I don’t know, Bette and Tina from The L Word, plus Ben Franklin from beyond the grave for good measure.
Regarding quality control, Vaz says, “Ideally, we’d be doing those tests beforehand,” but in the day-to-day, it’s not necessarily his team’s responsibility. “Maybe once it’s done the first time, it doesn’t get done with the same diligence.”
Or maybe it’s just not a priority. “There may be ways to control serving immediately after the conclusion of a session,” Abbell says, “but it’s not something most retailers are interested in suppressing.” He cites the 24-hour period post-purchase as the time when customers are most likely to still be in buying mode. So you’re basically getting spammed just in case you drop some more cash (my words, not his).
Guess what, though? Abbell also affirms that heck no, we don’t have to live like this. Poppin is changing the way they remarket by beginning to serve ads that feature collections of products: Buy a desk, see an ad featuring a desk/chair/filing cabinet/desktop organizers. Things you might need. “Instead of stalking our potential customers with the exact products they viewed, we’re backing out to take a more holistic brand approach,” he says. “We are shifting our focus now to... showing groups of products together. For Poppin, this should inherently help us avoid serving up the same products a customer just purchased in an ad.”
Well, hallelujah. Because to recap, here’s where we’ve been stuck for a long time.
Shamim: “I wouldn't mind ads if they were for products I wanted and not ones I'd already purchased.”
Okun: “It feels like what's happening now is a lot of noise, and it's irritating.”
Shield: “I'm annoyed.”
Me: “Me too.”
In the ever-relevant words of Fox Mulder, I want to believe. You know? If this whole thing ever gets solved permanently, I’d consider buying a couple more wedding dresses. Just for kicks. Especially if they got remarketed to me with some great shoes and a whole look.