Now that we're well out of the holiday season, it's time to take a few minutes--or hours, if your 'haul' was like one of those kids' from the TV show my Super Sweet Sixteen--and conduct inventory on the gifts you received.  "Alright," you say to your gifts, "which ones of you is a re-gift, and which ones of you will I treasure for years to come?"  It should be a pretty simple task.  The Blu-Ray you received probably isn't in this particular pile but rather long been set up in your entertainment center--shrugging apologetically at the progressive-scan DVD player as it was being switched out--while the Hillshire Farms Summer Sausage Sampler Pack is firmly established among this group of misfits, collecting dust since the morning of December 25th, when its brick-patterned wrapping paper was apprehensively removed.

The worst among these is the 'ween-gift--the gift that leaves you on-the-fence about whether to hold or fold. This might be the basket of wine cheeses you can someday see yourself sampling at a spring picnic (heh, yeah riiiiight...), or, conversely, giving to your fiancée's aunt to save yourself some coin when faced with buying a gift for someone who, one, you don't know anything about, and two, don't necessarily care about.  These are the gifts that take the longest to relegate to 're-gift' status. Eventually however, your logical side overtakes any romantic vision you had and a re-gift is born.  As an aside, please join me in listening to (sorry, copyright laws prevent me from saying watching) perhaps the most hilarious example of a re-gift attempt of all time (at bottom):

So where am I going with all this 're' talk?  Well, what if I told you it is possible to 'remarket' or 'retarget'?  According to a recent article in MediaBuyerPlanner, advertisers are severely under-utilizing this relatively new retail marketing feature.  This is how it works: suppose you go to backcountry.com and find a new pair of Smith sunglasses you want. You add them to your cart, enter your shipping address, and even go as far as to enter the first 4 digits of your credit card before deciding, "I don't want to buy this. This is impulsive." You close the browser window, close your wallet, and take a quick walk, shaken up by your close-call with impulse (your walk invariably leads you outside where you immediately squint at how bright the sun is...). 

If Backcountry wanted that business back, it could entice your return by utilizing 'remarketing'--or serving their ads on other sites you visit to constantly remind you of "what you could have had**".  As it turns out, many advertisers do have access to this remarketing feature, but as the article reports, only about 31% of them actually use it. A staggeringly low amount given some remarketing efforts have boosted ad response as high as 400%. 

Why not turn this into a co-operative marketing solution? I can see these online retailers that have similarly been 'doorbell ditched' swapping impressions on each other's sites, banding together to recover lost sales.  Any hey, even if they don't pursue the co-op advertising route, it's painfully obvious retailers need to make remarketing/retargeting a part of any media planning strategy they follow.  Good luck ducking those impulses now!

**Thank God my ex-girlfriend doesn't have access to this technology.