Eating the Remarketing Elephant

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If you are like many people in this industry you may struggle with how to tackle the sometimes immense task of getting remarketing campaigns approved by medical, legal, or other types of risk or compliance teams.

Just like any other important undertaking of consequence, the best way to handle this is to chunk it down into a series of smaller tasks, and take it one bite at a time. The reason taking it one bite at a time is helpful is that there is a lot of controversy about remarketing in the industry, and IT risk, regulatory review, and legal teams don't truly understand it. Human nature causes us to fear what we don't understand. It is our natural born fight or flight instinct, so the tendency is to squash it.

Forcing risk mitigators to eat an entire elephant in one sitting will undoubtedly cause some heartburn. Here are the top six tips to slicing this task into bite-size pieces.

1. Hold a lunch-and-learn type of session with them to introduce the idea before ever pitching it. Bring in partners from Google, Yahoo, or your other remarketing providers to help talk about the finer points of what they collect and how they collect it. Make sure that you have the right people from your partners in the meeting with you. If you are talking to IT you better have a technical expert in the room with you that gets the ins and outs of remarketing pixels both in terms of functionality, data collecting, and data security practices.
2. Gather examples of competitors that use remarketing and put together a "competitive landscape analysis" deck as a value add to your client. Use the deck to create strong case studies of remarketing's appropriate use by competitors. Try to show any numbers you can dig up to quantify the results that competitors are generating. When you leave it open and don't push for close in the deck, that will prompt questions throughout the organization that will spark more effective remarketing pitches.
3. Find examples of well-written privacy, terms of use, and tracking policies so that when questions come up in the risk review process you can not only say, "Trust me, it should be OK," but also, "Here is how competitors A and B address it."
4. Bring in outside help. There are a number of law firms that specialize in Internet law and advertising law. These specialists deal with these types of issues on a much more frequent and in-depth basis than the general practice corporate attorneys employed by most companies. They can effectively explain the right and wrong ways to do it and properly address risks. This is your secret weapon!
5. Do some benchmarking and quantify the opportunity. Legal teams will rarely make compromises for "cool stuff." But if you can quantify that with: "By not doing this we are losing $XX per year in revenue to our competitors," that tends to make them more likely to at least hear you out.
6. Show them what your campaign would look like and how you would message consumers. Once again, do everything you can to make sure that they don't have to think about how it might work. Anything left up to their imagination will only hurt your chances of getting it approved.

So do your research, be prepared, and take it slow. One review for an hour over the phone is generally never enough to make compliance teams comfortable with remarketing. The business existed before remarketing and will likely exist without it. Remember that when it comes to presenting remarketing it is much better to break your pitch process into a number of smaller steps than to try to educate and get approval in one fell swoop.