At a recent birthday party for one of the children in my neighborhood, I had my hopes for a slice of delicious birthday cake dashed. As the singing began, Mom came out with a candle-covered pizza. It turns out that junior just won’t eat cake.

You can imagine my angst at learning that a three-year-old child’s palate has already ruled out the seemingly infinite varieties of cake flavors, textures, and ingredient combinations.

How does this happen? It turns out our young friend recently discovered a five-month-old, partially eaten fruit cake in the back of the refrigerator and helped himself to a slice.

The cake was, of course, dense, cold, and filled with chunks of fruit that had long since lost any distinguishing color or natural flavor.  This experience was bad!  The dish was, in fact, a cake! Ergo, cake = bad.

Don’t Let A “Fruitcake” Experience Get You Down

Just as there are many varieties of cake, there are also many varieties of “search retargeting”.Recently it seems media buyers have had an initial “fruitcake” experience with search retargeting, and this experience is keeping them from reaping the benefits of this technique — which can be highly effective technique when done right.

Unfortunately, the buyer employs the same logic as the aforementioned child with the cake, ruling out all search retargeting based on one bad experience.

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