Retargeting Centralised: Tribal Fusion’s Doug Conely Adds His Thoughts On Points Raised In Recent Retargeting Post

Is it bad etiquette to respond such a long time after an original opinion piece? I didn’t read this too closely at the at the time but poor Paolo, our Starcom and Zenith rep, has been hassling me to take another look. He thought he was selling business to business online display media under contractual terms. Reading this he felt like he was selling cigarettes to kids in West Africa. Should he? Absolutely not. We’re a serious business operating at global scale with all the strategic, operational, technical and ethical requirements that entails. Many of our competitors feel the same way, I’m sure.
While this article was not directed at Tribal Fusion specifically we are an ad network with views on some of the underlying arguments here. Marco, I saw your comment in the original post about anonymous responders. Let me put it this way: how can a vendor take the risk to debate the opinion of a (potential?) customer publicly? Well, here goes…
Data leakage
Paul & Geoff, we spoke about this 12-18 months ago and my view hasn’t changed. If you think there are people abusing 1st party data then name them. It should be game over for them or let them defend their position. In many ways this is the reverse of publishers complaining that *some* ATDs were bullying them into data deals in the past in return for media spend or that they were harvesting data without the publisher’s permission. Both insinuations are unhealthy to the industry and both sides should name those they believe to be carrying out such practices.
From a Tribal Fusion perspective we also take this very seriously and even made 1st party data usage a standard condition of our IOs in late 2009. I’m sure none of the other major players are comingling 1st party data, there’s just too much to lose. So, we’ve just reached out to ABCe to see if we can set up some sort of 3rd party audit of our 1st party data processes. Any other network that wants to join in should do so. Agency Side Networks, sorry ATDs, should join too. Anyone that can think of someone better to adjudicate than ABCe, let us know. We can all put this one to bed then and remove one more fear factor for advertisers.
ePrivacy Directive
There’s nothing in the directive that says advertisers should not work with 3rd parties. It’s also false to believe that 3rd parties somehow have less to lose or are less likely to meet privacy requirements than agencies or ATDs. As in any regulated industry, clients need to pick those partners they trust and that meet the right industry standards, including agencies and trading desks.
Price Inflation & User Experience

No arguments with this. Retargeting segment bid inflation and universal frequency controls are a compelling rationale to manage retargeting centrally. Anyone doing this needs to be able to map the first visit to conversion timeline and adjust retargeting frequency and bidding strategy accordingly. The ability to layer in dynamic ads is a bonus. However, there is a paradox here. Current publisher RTB yields are driven by retargeting. What happens to those yields in this scenario and will it restrict access to biddable inventory if overall yields drop? Not a reason to stop but definitely something to think about.
Transparency
They say history is written by the victors. Let’s not rewrite the original rationale for blind inventory. Publishers wanted an additional revenue stream that did not cannibalise their direct sales channel. Transparent inventory has always been more expensive in this, and any other, industry. If clients are willing to pay more for transparency then they will get it. The real question is whether the vendors are trusted to provide safety behind that transparency. IASH was good step in this direction. Content verification technology is going in the right direction, but is far from complete. Arguably, safety guarantees may come at a price too as the verification will need to be statistically tested in many cases. Again, this is no different to other supply chain but, arguably, the industry is a bit behind in the standards to defend this.
Attribution
There’s another paradox here. Taking retargeting in-house means that on a last view basis the ATD will appear better than anything else on the plan. Will they disclose that to the agency or end client? If ATDs cut 3rd party retargeting do they really have the attribution tools to optimise this? What about the tools to run, optimise and measure upper funnel activity? We haven’t seen that much to date but would be happy to be wrong. From our perspective we see a lot of value in using look-alike models to provide that upper funnel activity and let the ATD focus on the retargeting management. But look-alike models need massive data sets, sophisticated processing tools… and access to 1st party data on which to build the model in the first place.
Overall, we expect to win some and to lose some in this debate. And we’ll lose some budget too (sorry Paolo). But we’re doing enough with data, look-alike models, rich media executions, etc to make sure that we win a lot more than we lose and provide value to end-clients via their agencies.