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Despite advances in advertising technology, retargeting is far from an exact science. Ads that follow consumers who seem like good prospects are often actually hitting too late in the buying cycle, after the consumer has already made a purchase. (That’s how ad tech often determines that you’re a good prospect.) So retargeting can result in ineffective campaigns, often missing the mark on truly “in-market” shoppers.

To address these inefficiencies, the ad tech community has recently adopted the psychological concept of “priming,” in order to “pretarget” audiences. Marketers can now screen audiences to find the consumers that are in-market and have declaratively expressed their purchase intent. The net result is custom audience segments of consumers that are ready — or primed — to buy.

Priming, a term from the field of psychology, refers to an implicit memory effect in which exposure to a stimulus influences an individual’s behavior toward a later stimulus or event. The individual may be unaware that the first stimulus has influenced her response to the second stimulus.

Continue reading at AdAge.com