I’ve witnessed the entire arc of the evolution of digital marketing – from 1995 when we needed to convince clients that they needed a website to (nearly) 2025 when we are just starting to get back to real marketing, in digital channels. You’ll see what I mean in a few paragraphs.
This post was inspired by Dan Gee and his article on “waste” in advertising — https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dangee1_advertising-marketing-media-activity-7264173989969727488-nFgQ HT Kathy Newberger for the heads up.
“Digital” was, and still is, seen as the most measurable medium for advertising. And it is. Digital is also the channel where in theory, it is possible to get “the right ad to the right person at the right time.” This was made possible by cookies, small bits of information in browsers, which allowed advertisers to track and uniquely identify individual users. This means the advertiser can deduce what the user likes and serve ads to them that, in theory, should perform better than ads that were not meaningful or interesting to the user. All of this makes sense, in theory.
But what has happened, in reality, over the last three decades of digital marketing is what I would call the “deep, dark rabbit hole of hyper-targeted advertising.” What started off as a good idea got further and further away from reality, because reality was too slow to drive the hockey-stick revenue growth that adtech companies needed to show to their investors to get the irrationally high valuations that were demanded of them. The further we got into digital advertising, the more bots and fraud that were needed to keep the revenue growth going up. Humans just don’t click ads often enough. Humans just don’t buy often enough. There are not enough actual sales for adtech companies to claim credit for, so they turned to media mix modeling and other blackbox algorithms to “show” customers that they drove lots of sales, even when the thread of causation was tenuous, at best.
Targeting, Retargeting, and Remarketing
Let me articulate more clearly how we fell into this rabbit hole and how we got deeper and deeper into the rabbit hold instead of pulling ourselves out of it.
Targeting. First we start with “targeting” in digital channels. Unlike on Facebook and Gmail, most humans are NOT logged into sites that they visit for content. That means the sites/publishers don’t know who the users are. So they started using tracking cookies in browsers to identify the users who visited. With these cookies, adtech companies could harvest the list of sites that a user visited and deduce what the user liked and possible who the user was. For example, if a user visited Sports Illustrated, ESPN, Maxim, and Playboy, it would be easy to deduce the user was male. Conversely, if the user visited Victoria’s Secret, Tampax, etc, one could deduce the user was female. But this kind of inference and deduction get far less accurate when we move beyond these over-simplistic examples. What can you deduce about users that visit Amazon dot com or Walmart dot com? Right, it’s much harder.
Retargeting. So adtech companies tried to…
