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The future of social media marketing

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By Alex Packham

Social media started out with Myspace and Bebo (oh the nostalgia) before graduating to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Here we are now in 2019, ‘hashtagging’ and ‘storying’ like it’s nobody’s business.

What’s next for the social media industry?

1. A shift in focus: less on feeds, more on private messages

The feed is such an integral part of social media networks that it could never just vanish overnight. Regardless, people are using social media more and more as a way to get in touch with people and have instant message conversations.

To remove the feed entirely could be problematic though. The feed is the main source of incoming for many social media networks as most people will spend their dwelling time here. It’s also used as a key space for advertising. With visual formats such as Stories and Facebook Watch gaining speed, it’s likely that advertising will inhabit these forms in the absence of a feed. After all, IGTV is in the midst of discussions on adding advertisements to the content as we speak.

We have no doubt that the feed will start to play a smaller role in the growth of social media networks, but it’s here to stay for a long while yet.

2. Despite numerous industry worries, influencers aren’t going away

2018 / 2019 has been a tricky time for influencers with a lot of bad press and finger-pointing documentaries. However, not all influencers are deserving of the bad rep.

Influencers who are troublesome in the industry will become extinct over the next few years. Their followers will lose trust and begin to diminish, while brands will ‘wise-up’ to influencer red flags and learn how to find influencers who will work more effectively with their brand.

Although social media networks are still likely to be saturated with #ad and influencers galore, it’s not really the end of the world. If trustworthy and authentic influencers are all that reminds then the odd paid promotion will be much less problematic than it is today.

One trend we expect to see more of very soon is brand marketers educating themselves more about the influencer marketing supply chain. This will enable them to only work with influencers who promote their brand effectively and actually sell their product. Watch this space for further developments.

3. Brands will be making more of an effort to plan their content and be more consistent across channels

As social media continues to be an incredibly saturated space, the quality of content must also rise.

Brands that are smart will invite a social media specialist to take a look at what they’re currently doing, as well as give advice on where social media (and the internet in general) is headed. This will enable them to get a leg-up on future trends and plan ahead for the next five years.

Brands not able to identify what works for their business will lose customers to their competitors.

Plan, execute, analyse and repeat what works.

4. Small communities will trump big networks for most businesses (even more than they already do)

We all know that Facebook Groups and messaging apps have become so very popular over the last couple of years as a way to unite people with similar interests in thousands of niche topics. Whatever your tipple, there’s a group for it, filled with like-minded individuals posed for a heated discussion.

The general public is bored of seeing the same story over and over again. But having the context of a group changes things. A post about a new coffee shop only becomes interesting and relevant to you when it’s posted within a Facebook Group specific to your location.

Furthermore, the average person is usually more comfortable participating in conversations and sharing opinions within a smaller community, without fear of judgement from the entire world wide web. This ‘safe space’ atmosphere will continue to help groups become a hub of activity and engagement.

One thing that won’t change is that social media is the cheapest, fastest and the most scalable marketing channel available to most companies. That isn’t going away, period.

Welcome to the next five years of social media marketing.

By Alex Packham

Sourced from The Drum

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PepsiCo is building an in-house media and data team to shape its adtech agenda

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By Katie Deighton

PepsiCo is in the process of building out an in-house team dedicated to bridging data with media planning in anticipation of the company’s “data-driven future”, The Drum has learned.

The North American outfit will be known internally as the media and consumer data team. It comes with a remit of bringing together the “science of data with media insights and activation” and shaping the beverage company’s core digital media and adtech strategies, according to postings on its jobs site.

The company has been recruiting roles in the fields of CRM, digital, data management, shopper marketing and AdTech.

The latter’s roles, in particular, will be crucial to implementing the company’s refreshed approach to digital media buying. Pepsi is looking to create and implement a new adtech strategy, inclusive of first party, third party, social, and connected partner data.

The new adtech vision will see an in-house team sit at the core and work with external vendors.

Execs within this function will also be expected to launch internal marketing initiatives to “build awareness and adoption of the adtech” within the company. PepsiCo is set to recruit for the first time an adtech senior analyst and an adtech lead.

The team will be headed up by Mike Scafidi, the company’s director of marketing technology and data strategy. The Razorfish veteran took up the role in October 2018 after leading PepsiCo’s ‘data accelerator’ for nearly two years.

Scafidi stated his new function will “be working every day to drive the organization’s data-driven future”.

The company unveiled an in-house ‘augmented intelligence’ tech dubbed Ada last year, in partnership with automated marketing platform Zappi. It hopes the AI will allow for a more seamless processing of its data in order to better inform marketing, pricing and sales decisions internally.

Outside of North America, PepsiCo has been putting more pressure on its media agencies to deliver stronger online media results through innovation. It recently partnered with Mindshare in APAC to test a blockchain programmatic alliance, which resulted in a 28% uplift in the efficiency of viewable impressions through the deployment of ‘smart contracts’.

PepsiCo has slowly been bringing its marketing functions in-house for some time. Back in 2015, its president at the time, Brad Jakeman, predicted “the agency model is not going to bend, it’s going to break” and warned agencies they would be getting a “smaller and smaller share of the pie”.

It has since pulled its core social media teams in-house and recently ended its relationship with VMLY&R, which had run its digital accounts for Gatorade and Tropicana for the best part of eight years.

The company’s in-house creative team, Creators League Studio, was famously responsible for the disastrous 2017 release of a spot featuring Kendall Jenner.

However, it recently tapped Goodby Silverstein & Partners for its 2019 Super Bowl spot.

Pepsi did not respond to The Drum’s requests for comment.

By Katie Deighton

Sourced from The Drum

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Put on an alternative spread this Easter

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By Caroline Parry

Indulgence and, of course, chocolate will always be crucial to Easter, but increasingly this holiday is seen as a celebration of springtime, and people are seeking gifts and experiences that reflect this shift.

This is no doubt that Easter is important to us, with 57% of consumers considering it to be a “proper” holiday, according to a 2018 YouGov survey. This is compared to say, Mother’s Day, which Britons do not see as such a big occasion.

Its importance in our lives is reflected in our social behaviour with Facebook seeing year-on-year growth of 1.6x in our conversations about Easter in 2017. The top five topics discussed around that time are significant others, food, beverages, parties and events, and travel, while the top trending Easter hashtags are #love, #chocolate and #family.

Let’s take a look at some emerging UK Easter trends for 2019 and supporting marketing activation tips advertisers could consider on Facebook platforms in line with these….

Alternative indulgence

Confectionary sales in the UK grew from £375m in 2017 to £395m in 2018. However, while chocolate will always have a place on the shelves at Easter, increasingly consumers are looking for Easter treats to marry with their growing concerns about sustainability and health. Many more of us will be searching for guilt-free ways to spoil ourselves this Easter!

With reducing plastic waste now high up on the agenda of most consumers, forward-thinking brands are thinking outside the traditional egg box to meet these concerns. Innovative chocolate brands, such as Montezuma, vegan brand Goupie and dairy-free brand Booja Booja, are using recyclable packaging, some of which is reusable.

Treating ourselves isn’t limited to gorging on chocolate, and for many people self-care is becoming the alternative way of indulging. Health and beauty e-tailer Lookfantastic struck a chord last Easter with its £65 Beauty Egg, which offered a limited edition collection of seven ‘must-have’ products packaged in a metal egg. No surprise then that this year’s Easter Beauty Egg Bungle had an early waiting list.

Marketing activation tip: Think outside the Easter egg box, by showing more options than just chocolate in your marketing campaigns. How about a carousel ad format where you can showcase a wider brand story and message through different images? For e.g. chocolate, eco packaging, as well as an idea for guilt-free or healthier indulgence / pampering.

The great Easter escape

With family a top trending hashtag over the Easter break, it is a holiday that is increasingly about sharing special moments together. With 72% of consumers feeling no pressure to buy Easter gifts, according to a 2018 Mintel Seasonal Shopping report, we are increasingly swapping presents for social experiences.

Spending on activities far outpaces gifts, according to the same Mintel report, with an average of £113 spent on sharing experiences together compared to £67 on presents. British adults love to hark back to their childhoods when out with friends, with many getting their Easter fun fix by going bowling or trampolining.

Families also love to get out and about, and the many events staged by brands around Easter are ideal opportunities for spending time together. Crafting days and Easter egg hunts, such as the Cadbury partnership with the National Trust, are always big draws, but alternative events such as the Science Museum’s Power Up, which combines gaming with an exhibition, appeal to both parents and kids.

As people prioritise spending time together and creating that sense of belonging, it is little wonder that 10 times more photos are posted and shared during the Easter breaks than before or after.

Marketing activation tip: You can broadcast direct from events so that a wider audience can join the fun and conversation by using the Instagram live feature! Bridge the real world and digital divide seamlessly. By leveraging Facebook marketing partners you can create ads and messaging which are triggered contingent upon weather. We all know British weather can be unreliable, so it’s handy to have bespoke messaging ready to roll out in rainy or sunny circumstances over the Easter weekend.

Creating a meaningful Easter

With Facebook seeing a spike in conversation around food, beverages and parties on Easter Day itself, we know the Easter feast is a vital part of the holiday. British consumers are investing more time and money in making food more meaningful by buying seasonal produce, often sourcing key ingredients locally at stores or markets.

Supporting British producers and local retailers adds real meaning and a sense of story to our Easter food. It’s the reason that over half of shoppers surveyed by digital marketing agency Silverbean, said it is the time of year when buying home-grown products and using local suppliers is essential.

Spring is a time of abundance when it comes to vegetables, and with interest in organic foods and local, independent shopping spiking around this time of year, many turn to social to celebrate their love for fresh local produce. And they really do love it, #rhubarb and #artichoke boast almost a million tagged boasts between them.

Even the major retailers understand shoppers are looking for ways to show their support for local and British suppliers. Morrisons uses a “blue passport” to mark up its lamb products as British and highlight their home-grown credentials. Meanwhile, Hyke Gin is tackling both local and food waste by taking unwanted grapes from the British supply chain and turning it into gin.

Marketing activation tip: If you have great content like Easter ingredients, recipes and pictures to share, consider trying the Instant Experiences templates to quickly create valuable interactions with your customers. Did you know Instant Experiences are loading faster than ever? – now 15 times faster than standard mobile websites – so you can use them to seamlessly connect to an audience. Also, if you have a great local story to tell about your product, you can geo target ads to a certain audience where that messaging would resonate strongly.

Easter, a season of sun

With Easter bringing the first Bank Holidays of the year, it is an excellent opportunity for a holiday or breaks. Almost half of the £1.1bn spent over the Easter weekend in 2018 was spent on Easter getaways, according to travel website Kayak, and 89% of Easter conversation on Facebook in the UK was on mobile.

After the long winter, many are chasing the sunshine and warmth. Back in 2016, the “cool” and adventurous Scandi destinations were booming, last year saw consumers look to sunnier climes. Dubai was the most booked destination for Easter in 2018, with the perennially popular Spanish cities of Malaga and Alicante close behind.

Once again, environmental issues rate high on the agenda for British consumers. Green mini-breaks are becoming the preferred choice for many consumers. The Hilton London Bankside has responded with the creation of the world’s first vegan hotel room, which features suede-like furnishings made from mushroom matter.

Marketing activation tip: Travel insurance brands may want to up-weight their activity on Facebook and Instagram as we know most people leave it last minute to get their insurance sorted! Geo targeting such ads around airports and stations can prove effective. Hotels and retreats can showcase their unique or new look sustainable offerings in a more immersive way by using the power of 360° videos and boosting that content as ads to maximise reach and amplification.

Summary

Easter is still very much about chocolate eggs and bunnies, but consumers increasingly see it as an opportunity for treating themselves, and for spending time with family and friends by sharing great experiences. It is increasingly important however that enjoying these holiday moments is not at the expense of their wider concerns around health and sustainability.

By Caroline Parry

Sourced from The Drum

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LinkedIn brings lookalike audiences to B2B marketing

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By Andrew Blustein

LinkedIn has added lookalike audiences to its ad offerings after beta testing the tool over the last year.

Lookalike audiences are nothing new, as Facebook has shown. LinkedIn’s director of product, Abhishek Shrivastava, said it “took us some time” to build the tool.

Marketers could already go to a platform like Facebook to discover new audiences using existing customer data. LinkedIn is now offering that for B2B marketers by making it easier to find company names or job titles.

Audience templates, another new offering, streamline the process of finding audiences. According to Shrivastava, it’s a one-step process that separates audiences job titles and functions into 20-plus templates.

LinkedIn has over 610m users and, according to Shrivastava, it has seen over 30% growth in the number of sessions per user over the last year.

“Because of all this activity happening on the platform by our members on an increasing basis…it allowed us to tap into a lot of the signals that have allowed us to create the lookalike product, which requires a lot of signals to do the modeling of who are users,” said Shrivastava.

LinkedIn also announced it will integrate Bing data for the first time into its ad products. Marketers can now leverage Bing data with LinkedIn’s interest-based targeting tool it launched in January.

“If someone searched for an article on digital marketing trends, that would map them to a category of being interested in marketing,” explained Shrivastava. “That list of categories is what we are exposing within our campaign manager on LinkedIn, to allow our customers to create campaigns to reach people who are interested in that particular topic.”

Shrivastava said connecting Bing and LinkedIn data “gives marketers the best of both worlds”.

By Andrew Blustein

Sourced from The Drum

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A guide to Apple’s disabling of Facebook’s consumer research app

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By .

The social network paid people to monitor their phone activity and Apple was not happy

Facebook and Apple are in another fight over privacy and data after reports surfaced on Wednesday that Facebook built a consumer research app that opened a backdoor to iPhones. The phonemaker, which disabled the app, has accused the social network of violating its app rules.

Apple and Facebook have had a contentious relationship since Apple CEO Tim Cook took a hardline stance against data-collection practices of internet ad giants, calling for more regulations in the industry. Facebook then hired a public relations firm to push back against the criticism of its business model.

The latest episode in the saga is a bit hard to follow. To help, here’s our guide to what happened.

The Facebook Research App
Facebook recruited phone users to install a consumer research app that tracked their web traffic, messaging, app usage and more. About 5 percent of the participants were younger than 18, according to Facebook. (Minors were prompted to get permission from parents during the download process, for what that’s worth.) The app program was managed by third party companies uTest, BetaBound and Applause, which helped distribute the app.

Quick cash for consumers
People who participated in the consumer research typically received $5 to $10 to download the app and up to $20 a month to keep it active. It was almost like a multilevel data marketing deal because people could also make money for each person they referred, and then extra money each month that those people kept the app active. According to online commenters who say they participated in the program, people could potentially even make hundreds of dollars a month. (Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.)

Why does Apple care?
In August, amid a privacy backlash against Facebook, Apple shut down a similar app from Facebook called Onavu, which also collected details about people’s phone usage. Apple said it violated its App Store policies, and no apps should collect data about other apps people have on their phones.

Facebook’s workaround
The new research app avoided Apple’s App Store by using a program that Apple created for enterprise customers. Companies like Facebook use the enterprise program to build internal company apps, apps for communication, transportation and other logistics useful to employees. However, the apps in the enterprise program are only for employees.

Who the fallout is affecting
Perhaps the people most affected at this point are Facebook employees. Apple not only disabled the research app, it shut down all of Facebook’s other utility apps for employees, reportedly leading to some chaos at the office. Facebook has said it’s talking to Apple about getting its internal apps back online.

Without the internal app program, Facebook will have trouble beta testing changes to its main apps, as well, like when it tries out a new design on Instagram or a new feature on WhatsApp, but only among employees.

Also on the case: lawmakers
Lawkmakers have added this issue to the host of others that led Congress to call CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg to testify before them last year. On Wednesday, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, issued a statement that said, “I have concerns that users were not appropriately informed about the extent of Facebook’s data-gathering and the commercial purposes of this data collection.”

What about those consumers?
Everyone who participated were aware they were participating in market research, according to Facebook. Also, Google and other companies have similar research programs. Nielsen employs thousands of everyday Americans to share their TV viewing habits for market research.

On the other hand, it’s hard to tell if Facebook adhered to the strictest standards of disclosure, and how well-informed participants were. And Facebook already has been under a microscope for privacy and data-sharing issues, most notably the Cambridge Analytica scandal. There have also been questions raised about how Facebook handled user privacy and data, especially in its early days.

Bottom line
No advertiser will pull their money from Facebook over this, but they will call their ad agency and ask what the hell is happening, again.

Feature Image Credit: Bloomberg

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Sourced from AdAge

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Little tech tweaks can make a big difference

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Despite what retailers may think, digital transformation doesn’t always require huge business model changes and drastic process shake-ups.

Today’s retail landscape is more competitive than ever before, so it is crucial for businesses to embrace digitalisation and new technologies to gain and maintain a competitive edge in today’s market. As the retail sector attempts to keep up with changes in consumer behaviour and customer experience expectations, failure to bridge the gap between what buyers what and what brands offer can often mean the end of a business. Massive retailers including Patisserie Valerie and Coast have shown severe distress signals this year, and it is becoming imperative for brands to continuously perform at the top of their game in order to survive against the challenges posed by competitors and market fluctuations.

Longstanding womenswear retail chain Bonmarché felt the struggles of a downturned high street  earlier this year, when shares in the company dropped 18 per cent after a warning that profits would fall short due to weak consumer demand. Other retailers have also fallen prey to the worsening retail environment, with several well-established chains having closed stores or seeking serious financial restructuring in order to survive, including Toys R Us and Debenhams. It is becoming increasingly clear that change needs to happen, and that brands need to innovate to survive. Overall, brands that fail to offer good customer experiences will struggle. Little but impactful technological changes could make a huge difference to a business’ operations and profits.

Digital transformation is huge and can often feel like a mountain to climb. However, despite what retailers may think, it doesn’t always require huge business model changes and drastic process shake-ups. As it becomes clearer that customer experience is the key to driving sales, businesses should not overlook the benefits of making small changes that can greatly enhance the experiences of their customers. This is especially crucial given that over half (56 per cent) of international adults are more likely to choose digital resources for recommendations on products and services. Strong ‘word of mouth’ is vital, and good customer service is intrinsic to this.

The help of AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) can help retailers analyse customer behaviour, journey data and assist in identifying their individual needs – so they can then be met. By starting to predict what customers want, and need, AI (in tandem with machine-learning) can elevate the whole shopping experience to another level. As it stands, only 7 per cent of retailers currently use AI to enhance their services, and this should increase as retailers see the benefits that AI-driven technology can provide.

Thread, an online start-up, has used AI to assist men in selecting clothes – and subsequently raised £16.7 million from investors, further demonstrating that retailers should look to new, AI-driven technologies to stay competitive. Interactions and conversations between humans and brands become more productive for both parties with AI-enabled technologies. This is because these technologies combine artificial intelligence and data to provide analytics – learning from and responding to a slew of data points in a way that no human ever could. With these analytical insights available, high street retailers can provide the empathetic, responsive service that customers appreciate and increasingly demand. It’s a win-win: consumers get a customised service, and retailers benefit from their improved customer satisfaction which builds brand loyalty and ultimately helps boost market position.

Despite what retailers might think, AI doesn’t always have to mean going as far as installing a team of robot workers to keep up with the digital landscape. However, robot-driven technologies can certainly help. When it comes to the specific technology elements that retailers can implement to start reaping the benefits of digital transformation, dynamic call numbers are just one example of how simple elements can offer huge growth benefits. Simply put, these are unique phone numbers, assigned to each visitor, that are automatically displayed on a brand’s website or in a digital advertising campaign. This simple feature gives businesses the ability to track a specific customer’s journey, and provides extended data insights into that customer, helping to deliver a tailored customer experience.

 Putting customers at the heart of business operations

Retailers can also look to geographical call routing as a method of attracting their target customers across different regions. Call routing allows users to understand the digital context of each visitor, such as by discovering why they were visiting the site, where they came from, and why they ultimately contacted the brand. With this rich contextual data, businesses can then target the customers who truly want to buy and prioritise the journey of these customers through to specific call handlers who are trained and equipped to handle their enquiries most effectively.

Using a dashboard to analyse customer insights and enabling call tracking are also simple functionalities that businesses can utilise to drive growth. For example, enabling customers to text customer service departments, instead of having to call them (and most likely be put on hold or stuck in a long queue) can help speed the process up – both for customer service teams and for customers themselves. This is especially effective when targeting key audience demographics. For example, millennials tend to prefer text messaging over making phone calls, so for businesses who cater to this age range as their primary sales segment, implementing this type of tech is a no-brainer.

Retailers need to put customers at the heart of their business operations, now more than ever. They should also use data insights to not only enhance customer experiences, but also direct investments in the long run for optimal growth. Advertising and marketing campaigns have previously involved putting large sums of money into campaigns to increase profits, without generating insights post-campaign to understand its effectiveness. This is not a sustainable, or wise, way of spending – and could lead businesses to ruin later down the line.

In today’s competitive marketplace, companies need to make use of every tool they have at their disposal – as well as investing in new tools – to minimise chances of failure and maximise success. Spending lots of money doesn’t have to be the answer – but spending in the right way, on technologies that improve customer experience, will be vital in the coming months and years.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock/Wichy

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CEO, Freespee

Sourced from ITProPortal

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The web design trends brands need to prepare for in 2019

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By James Pruden

2019 is set to see ecommerce sales increase by 19.5% globally, offering an opportunity to savvy brands who are up to speed on the latest web design trends and developments to drive significant additional market share.

But what do brands need to bear in mind in 2019 to ensure that they continue to deliver relevant standout online design, and therefore sales?

Mobile First

It’s vital to implement mobile first design in 2019. In 2015 mobile searches overtook those on desktop, making mobile search the highest search form worldwide. In accordance with this, Google has changed which sites they index first — they now prioritise mobile sites over those that aren’t mobile friendly.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind that this push toward mobile first design isn’t just based on ranking factors or SEO, the visual result must enhance the user’s experience on the device that they will most likely be searching from.

This focus on mobile first requires a fundamental shift in the way that websites are designed. It used to be that a site would only be created for a desktop or laptop computer and a mobile-friendly or mobile responsive design might be added as well. Today, it’s critical to design the site for the mobile user first, before creating a version that will also standout for those on desktops.

Micro-animations/movement

Using moving micro-animations along with feedback loops – that deliver movement when hovering over an icon – help make websites more usable and engaging. The details of the micro-interactions: the button clicks and the page transitions can greatly improve a user’s experience on your site, meaning they are far more likely to return. It’s this meaningful motion, connecting an action with a reaction, that satisfies a user’s desire for interactivity. And with touch interfaces, especially on small screens, it has never been more important to deliver motion in micro-animations and feedback loops to make the interaction smooth and guide users on their journey to checkout.

Custom and classic fonts

Expect a move back to custom and classic font design – clean but formal – with bigger and bolder typefaces, and a move away from humanist fonts as brands aim to standout against the proliferation of humanist typefaces.

Colour

Bright colours should be used more liberally in 2019 to deliver greater standout. The last two years has seen an explosion of big, bold colour across the internet with an increasing number of brands choosing to use their core packaging brand colours as backing for their graphics, with clashing tones moving away from the edgy start-ups into the mainstream. Those who have embraced arresting colours include The Premier League, Sky and eBay. Though bear in mind a classic font design and bright colours won’t be suitable for all. The choice of font and colours has to be right for the values of the brand and resonate with the audience they are targeting.

Optimise for search

As is always the case, making sure the design of your website is optimised for search algorithms is vital. Developments in web design will be driven by what Google’s constantly evolving search algorithm looks for. To this end, make sure that the content being communicated is relevant to your target audience and written as naturally as possible. Google looks for honest, human generated content. Of course, this must be quality content to encourage others to have weblinks back to your site to aid your SEO efforts. If users want to share your copy this highlights to Google that you are a valuable resource and the reward for your efforts will be an improved organic search ranking.

Speed

With research revealing over half of consumers leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load, websites must be designed with speed in mind. Also, the faster your site loads the better it will rank in search results, particularly in Google search. This is not to say that websites should be sparse affairs with limited content and imagery for the purposes of speed. With better broadband it’s much easier to have image and content heavy sites that can load quickly. However if you have an app it’s seriously worth considering hosting it on a Progressive Web App (PWA) for speed purposes. A PWA can be launched from a home screen and can be ready in less than a second, often beating native apps in load times.

All brands need to constantly evolve their web design to continue to standout and deliver an engaging experience to their users that generates sales. By recognising and having these six web design points front of mind, brands will be well placed for a profitable 2019 online.

By James Pruden

James Pruden is studio director at Xigen

Sourced from The Drum

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How Much Digital Advertising Is Too Much?

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It’s been almost two years since Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer of Procter & Gamble, told the digital advertising industry to clean up its act. The e, currently the world’s second largest CPG company, was tired of what he perceived as massive waste in the digital advertising supply chain. He was referring to the lack of transparency between advertisers and digital agencies and the alphabet soup of ad-tech players that created complexity without always clearly defining value.

Since Pritchard was the man holding the purse strings of one of the single largest advertising budgets in the world, the digital industry stood up and took notice.

Getting Tough

Since that time agencies, publishers, and the ad-tech industry have all taken steps to increase transparency, both around media quality and around where and how advertising dollars are actually spent.

In mid-2017, Pritchard declared the job of cleaning up digital roughly half done citing reductions in fraud and increased transparency. However, he didn’t stop there.

Between April and July of 2017, P&G cut more than $100 million in digital advertising spend, citing the continued prevalence of bot traffic and brand safety challenges presented by risky content. These reductions remained in place from July until December, removing roughly another $100 million from the market by the end of the year. The reduction was meant to reduce waste, pulling dollars away from risky, fraudulent, and non-viewable inventory. But the final impact went much further than reducing waste.

The Result

According to P&G, the result of these dramatic cuts to its digital spend was a 20% reduction in ineffective ad spend. In some cases, P&G reduced its spend by as much as 50% with specific big-name partners with no reported negative impact on ROI.

Perhaps more surprisingly, the CPG leader measured a 10% increase in overall reach of its campaigns. On the surface, this result is counterintuitive, P&G reduced its spend and the overall number of placements, but reached more consumers. The result was likely driven by the increased efficiency of carefully pruning ineffective inventory and reallocating remaining budget to higher quality placements.

P&G competitor Unilever, which likewise commands market-shaping amounts of ad spend, similarly reduced its total advertising budget. The CPG giant reduced spend by nearly 51% across digital channels. While Unilever doesn’t break out its ad spend, the company similarly reported no ill-effects on ROI from the dramatic spending cuts.

What next?

Experiments by CPG leaders like P&G and Unilever have made waves in the market, revealing that ad spend alone doesn’t drive value when not tied to quality metrics like viewable inventory.

By pushing the envelope on quality these advertisers learned that some of the seemingly immutable paradigms of digital — the scale is king, and quality is beyond our control — weren’t as unshakable previously assumed.

So how should advertisers proceed based on this information? Three tips to keep in mind:

  1. The platforms can be moved. When advertisers put pressure on the digital advertising ecosystem, the ecosystem gave way. Agencies and ad platforms previously assumed to be immovable made a concerted effort to provide quality. That’s a powerful lesson, especially for brands that feel powerless in the face of the duopoly platforms of Google and Facebook. Collective action can reshape the ad ecosystem for the better.

  2. Measure the things that matter. Pure scale, as measured by impressions, has been the standard metric for advertising success, but P&G’s experiment proved that quality of impressions had more impact on ROI than brute number of impressions.

  3. Budget isn’t everything.  For marketers who don’t have P&G-sized ad budgets to play with, the numbers indicate that it’s still possible to drive meaningful results. A focused media strategy that prioritizes context and quality can carry the day even in the face of smaller budgets.

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For D2C companies, marketing looks more like sales

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By Jesse Horwitz

Big brands are wrestling with how to build direct relationships with consumers, and how to do so in spite of data ownership and data privacy challenges. It’s true there’s simply no better way to learn about consumers’ preferences and how to most efficiently serve them than by selling products or services directly.

Collecting first party data about sales is the distinct benefit of selling to consumers without a middleman, and that’s why big businesses see so much promise in the startups dedicated to the model.

So far this year, investors have spent $1.2bn on young, little-known direct-to-consumer businesses, that’s up from $810m in all of 2017, according to CB Insights. These startups are also ripe for acquisition. In recent years, Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club for $1bn, Walmart purchased Bonobos for $310m, and Kellogg bought RXBar for $600m.

My company, Hubble, sells contact lenses direct to consumers via subscription. Neither I nor my partner have a background in optical, sales or marketing. Rather, we’re numbers folks with backgrounds in finance, consulting, and programming. Within a year, we logged $20m in revenues.

I credit a lot of our success, and the success of other D2Cs, with knowing how to access data and build relationships using this data (plus knowing how to help the customers gain from the data, because otherwise they won’t share it – consumers are whip smart).

For D2C companies, marketing looks more like sales. D2C businesses don’t launch one message at every consumer, but rather vary their approach and their offers to each individual, using data analysis to optimize it, and technology to ramp it up to a mass scale. This individualized direct marketing interaction allows the business to hone its sales pitch to a razor’s edge.

To achieve this, it’s imperative to prioritize the right data – and that’s often not the traditional marketing metrics you might be thinking of. Focus on the data that allows you to sync up consumer behavior and your operations. For example, when it comes to measuring costs, forget the ones that pervade e-commerce, such as cost per click. What really matters is cost per acquisition.

Another important figure is your customer’s lifetime value, because that will tell you how much you can spend acquiring them. You also can’t run your business without understanding how much your customers are ordering, and what profits those orders deliver. That, in turn, means understanding your margins inside and out.

With these metrics available, D2Cs can learn the right message to send, at the right cost, to the right person—information that brands working through retailers can only approximate. This is the holy grail of marketing, and just moving brand spend to digital doesn’t get you there.

All this said, there is a competing reality. While a D2C-style sales strategy have obvious benefits, it can’t take away all the pain. On the manufacturing side, scale effects still hold and manufacturing more product leads to lower cost. And, nothing is more efficient (sorry, Amazon) than driving product in trucks to Big Box stores for sale to the consumer.

D2Cs, in consumer-packaged goods especially, don’t enjoy these advantages.

I like to imagine what business would be like if you could bring the strengths of these two worlds together: large scale manufacturing, big box stores, and digital direct marketing. It would be revolutionary, and even better it would benefit all parties: retailers, brands, and most of all consumers.

So far, however, the conversation has been framed as either/or, as David vs Goliath. The next step is finding the “and.”

The IAB’s Randall Rothenberg spoke to this when the bureau released a direct brands study earlier in the year. To brand marketers, he said: “You must watch [D2C brands]. You must know them. You must partner with them.”

It’s time we learn from each other and create solutions that we can all stand behind.

By Jesse Horwitz

Jesse Horwitz is the co-chief executive and co-founder of Hubble Contacts.

Sourced from The Drum

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Making the most of a post privacy world

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By Tom Goodwin

A generation of people have now grown up seemingly constantly broadcasting their lives on Instagram, sharing their innermost thoughts on Twitter, intimate details of life on Facebook and yet the world seems shocked that we’ve lost any sense of privacy. We now live in an age when it seems every Instagram user wants to be an influencer, to be popular and envied and to not have anyone know anything about them.

Ever more apps continuously ask us to share location data, software updates ask us to share our personal details, messaging apps want to scan the most personal communications we can imagine and access our friends lists too. And all in an era where security breaches are common, where nefarious companies seek to sway elections, where our data seems to be used to target us with ads that are designed to be as personal as possible, but never creepy, and yet haunt and chase us in on online lives.

Our homes are now wire tapped, not secretly and against our will, but we pay money and eagerly await delivery of connected smart speakers. We now volunteer all manner of information to Google, our location, photos, our calendar invites, our intentions are known by a global sentient network, more than our own selves.

It’s easy to think this is all a relentless march towards the dreadful future where our personal lives are invaded, where privacy is dead, where we can’t escape the filter bubble, where personalized ads follow us around like Minority Report, with few marketers aware it was a film about a dystopian future, not what should be done.

While we may hate personalization, the only thing we dislike more is irrelevance. We hate it when we phone up credit card companies and they don’t immediately know it’s us. We can’t imagine a world without Google offering us better search results based on our browsing history, we like that our weather is automatically shown in our location. Most people would happily swap mesothelioma class action lawsuit TV ads for a well-made commercial for some trendy new jeans.

The marketing and business world has long tip toed around the edge of the privacy debate. We take as much data as we can, whenever we can, we store it badly and hope to never awake the beast that is the customer. If we were to work around earning data from people, by giving them trust that we will use it wisely, not sell it, keep it massively securely and offer clear value in exchange, then life would be very different.

I’d love to see the world embrace privacy trading. How do we maximize the value offered to people in return for storing limited and intimate data about people in a transparent and trusted manner?

Uber knows that the only way for the app to work is to know where you are precisely and in real-time and we understand that and allow it. We know Google Traffic knows our location but uses it anonymously to process all traffic conditions and we’re fine with the net benefit. Dating apps track our location because sharing that is a small price to pay for life or evening long romance.

I like the thought experience of a post privacy world. Maybe I’m naive but if my airline knew exactly where I was at all times then it would be able to serve me better, to come and find me if I’m in the lounge and keep the plane from leaving without me. If my credit card company knew the same could it stop declining payments because I’m abroad and didn’t tell them? If my TV set knew I was in the market for a new car, new auto insurance and I liked leather manbags, is that a terrible world to live in? What if retailers had my face stored on file and I could pay for things with a smile? What if Uber could access my calendar and offer me cars when I’m running late? What if a hotel company could tell from my voice on phone calls I’m stressed and suggest a spa for me? What if a burger joint could tell I was hungry and not been there and entice me in with a special offer? What if a clothing retailer knew my size?

It’s easy to use the slippery slope argument against this and to assume that we can’t control a precise level of privacy. A company knowing you’ve bought a TV is one thing; knowing your blood test results or genetic code is absolutely another. If health insurers, for example, could ever access some of this information, we’d have absolute mayhem.

Yet the privacy debate is rooted in paranoia. It assumes companies want to know everything and not merely enough and likely in an anonymous way. It assumes advertisers want to build rich personal files and harass customers near endlessly. And given this has been so far how we’ve acted it’s easy to see why.

I’d love a discussion driven less by technology and language like targeting, and one driven by empathy and about serving people better. I’d love to see how we can start the process of asking permission, clear opt ins, clear trust, world class security protocols, and above all else a way to maximize the value exchange over a lifetime for all. Privacy is a recent invention, it’s perhaps the ultimate luxury for the future, but will it matter. Will our kids miss something like privacy, a concept they’ve probably never known.

Feature Image Credit: online information being given freely – picture from Pexels

By Tom Goodwin

Tom Goodwin is head of innovation at Zenith Media. A writer and speaker, Goodwin is the author of Digital Darwinism: Survival of the Fittest in the Age of Business Disruption. Previously, he has spoken at leading conferences and industry events around world, including Cannes Lions and CES.

Sourced from The Drum

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