I'm exasperated as I reach the top of the 4th floor stairwell and jump-kick the steel bar that stretches across the fire door, gaining entry to a long hall.  I'm sprinting now, the noise coming from the pounding of my feet hitting the end of the hall and bouncing back at the speed of sound, echoing throughout.  I take a sharp left down an adjacent hall, immediately noticing a large window at the other end, stretching to the floor.  "Should I Die Hard-it and dive through the double-pane glass, hoping to land atop the building below? Or do I Master-Key-Guy-Off-The-Matrix 2-it and duck into any one of the rooms I'm passing now at a rate of two per second, instantly launching me to a new corner of the earth?"

Neither, see, because I'm only figuratively escaping the pursuer.  I know, boring.   

In all actuality, last week, while scanning Eastbay for footwear that's a little less enclosed (flops) than what I've currently got, I 'picked up a tail' as they say in every cop movie ever made.  Spending approximately three minutes looking at a particularly interesting pair was my first mistake.  Unfortunately, this totally harmless activity gave the re-marketing 'parasite' enough time to 'latch on'.  I know this because for the next three days a good 80% of the websites I visited featured multiple Eastbay ads--and not just any old banner ad, but a banner ad featuring the exact shoe I was looking at!  Perhaps the most remarkable thing, however, was that this was on everything from big sites like MSN.com, all the way to little local news sites like KATV.com.



As I blogged in early March via an article in MediaBuyerPlanner, this re-marketing technology enables retailers to serve future ads on other sites to try enticing buyers that browsed but didn't buy into returning to remind them what they've left behind.  The article pointed to how underutilized this marketing software tool really is.  Well, I'm here to tell you, while parasitic, this technology is both ingenious, effective, and quickly becoming less than underutilized.  How do I know they're effective?  Well, allow me to finish the story...

...Being old-fashioned concerning chase scenes, I quickly choose the former, ripping my jacket off as I sprint and swinging it around my body to cover my torso and head as I punch through the curiously easy-to-shatter window.   The jacket floats down into the alley below as I miss my landing, hitting the edge of the building's top, dangling with both arms fully extended, fingers curled around the lip of the stone that caps the building's waist-high wall.  Kicking my feet against the edge of the building, I pull myself up and over onto roof and collapse with a grunt. I look up to realize I'm surrounded by goons.  With guns. Caught.

That's right, I know re-marketing is effective because what really happened is I clicked on the damn banner ad the third day and bought the damn shoes hook-line-and-sinker.  [To get the ads to go away? or because I wanted them? Hmmm...]

Nice work, Eastbay--retail marketing at its best.  I can't wait for others to adopt this technology. I'm sure they can't either!


For more information on cool marketing software tools, download Balihoo's whitepaper here.