Best ... Targeting ... Ever

Best ... Targeting ... Ever

2/22/11

By Ken Magill

Constant Contact last week served arguably the most targeted display ad in the history of business-to-business online marketing.

A blog post on FavStocks.com explained to readers of the author’s email newsletter that the newsletter would be delayed because his email service provider booted him off the service.

“Their reason was that I had too many complaints,” the unidentified author wrote. “When I checked the report for my latest email sent a couple weeks ago, I saw I had one complaint as of the day they canceled my account. That’s one out of around 1400 subscribers. I called and talked to someone in both their technical support department and their sales support department, but they both said that there was nothing they could do, the decision had been made.”

He then asked for recommendations for a new email service provider.

“Anyone out there have any suggestions on good email services?” he wrote.

And embedded in the middle of the piece was an ad for Constant Contact.

Talk about catching someone in market. Ads don’t get more targeted than this, even if it was mostly by coincidence.

Here’s to hoping (a) the author’s legit, is not a spammer and pays his bills, and (b) Constant Contact got the business.

Here is a link. The ads rotate and seem to be for Constant Contact about half the time.

And Now for Some Abject Stupidity

The following tidbit doesn’t warrant an article, but I felt compelled to share it so I decided to tack it onto the end of this piece.

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert’s quote at the end says it all.

Here is the stupidity: Utah officials recently waited for eight months to find out if the state would be allowed to use email rather than paper to communicate with Medicaid recipients and save $6 million a year, said Herbert, according to an article published by The Commonwealth Fund.

Permission was denied. Guess how.
 
"They sent us a denial by e-mail," Herbert said. "The irony is rich."

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Terms: Feel free to be as big a jerk as you want, but don't attack anyone other than me personally. And don't criticize people or companies other than me anonymously. Got something crappy to say? Say it under your real name. Anonymous potshots and personal attacks aimed at me, however, are fine.

Posted by: Sravanthi
Date: 2011-02-23 00:27:55
Subject: Relevant keywords in the article

Or the ad would've come up because of the relevant keywords used in his article related to email marketing Maybe constant contact configured their ads to come up at places where there are relevant keywords - Just a wild guess.

Posted by: Justin
Date: 2011-02-22 15:55:42
Subject: Too Many Complaints?

Classic use of remarketing ads, but does CTCT really want the business of someone who got booted by their last ESP due to excessive complaints?

Posted by: Market Man
Date: 2011-02-22 12:59:43
Subject: Adsense

Thats adsense for ya... Very relevant ads...

Posted by: MelanieAt
Date: 2011-02-22 12:36:11
Subject: The ads are targetted because they visited the CTCT website

at some point. That's why. I get ice.com ads, because I'm trolling their websites daily.