Omnichannel Retargeting, the scary future is near.

If you’re worried about your privacy, don’t read this post. Even if you’re not familiar with the wordretargeting, you have suffered it for sure. Let’s say you are looking for a nice hotel to spend your Christmas in Bahamas. You visit your favorite online travel agency and start narrowing your choice set, based on others’ opinions, availability and price. You finally see one you like, you check the pictures, room types and so on. You stop it there, maybe you bookmark the page, and you close your browser since probably you want to share it with your relative at home. A couple of hours later you check another page, maybe an online newspaper. Suddenly, every ad you see is related with Bahamas and the hotels you have been looking at. You wonder how does the newspaper website know you’re going to Bahamas on vacation.

What you probably didn’t know is at somewhere, both in the Newspaper and the Travel agency websites, you accepted a cookie policy that allow them to share information through third parties. This cookie is the bit of information stored in your computer that is linking your profile between a bunch of websites out there under the same advertising network. And as of today, this is only available at websites (maybe some apps too).

The good thing about apps is they not only can keep track of what you do in the app (the same you could get from a website), but they know a lot more of things that can be used for retargeting.

For instance, imagine you stop by your favorite clothes shop. You use their app to scan the NFC tag on a pair of jeans and share it with your friends. You get home, open your Facebook and see an offer to buy those jeans online.

But you don’t even have to do anything. You are looking for a new car, you get to the nearest Volkswagen dealer, there is an iBeacon in each car that knows you have been sitting in the New Beetle. You leave… and that evening, when you’re visiting your favorite online car blog, it’s crowded with New Beetle banners offering a test drive.

¿What about TV? Imagine you’re watching your favorite TV show. You have a second screen App that knows what are you watching… including the commercials, where there is a great ad about tourism in Japan. Next time you visit one of your freemium apps, they will show you banners about Japan… And when the TV will not be broadcasted anymore, but on demand, ads will be pushed in the same way banners are. More personalization, more retrargeting.

So all this is very promising, but also very scary. Some consequences of this near future:

1. Lawyers will have to work harder, in order to structure term conditions and privacy options, basically to allow companies to do what they want with your data. And technology has to follow, privacy settings control should include multi device, multi position, multi brand options.
2. Media agencies will have to work harder, in order to structure a real strategy based on consumer profiles. Is not anymore about where the target is and pushing some GRPs or banners to mass media, is about understanding the consumer journey and defining rules that cover different behaviors. Needless to say that CMOs and their teams need also to understand this new paradigm.
3. Communication opportunities will arise between brands sharing the consumer’s basket. Cross selling will not happen in the supermarket, it will happen anywhere. These agreements will allow to share data, with more legal implications.

How all this will change the relationship between consumers and brands? I’d love to hear your opinions on this topic.