Tag: Adweek

The annual tech and innovation fest gets under way in Cologne this week. This year’s tantalising premise is that, “Digital is everything — not every thing is digital.” Why? Because digital marketing is about to get personal.

In recent years there has been the perennial focus on smart data, the internet of things and convergence. But, this year the ‘tip of the spear’ will be about people-based marketing. As all forms of communication become increasingly addressable the undeniable truth is that we now have the capability to reach people on a one-to-one basis and that represents an opportunity to speak to consumers in an eminently personalised fashion.

Delivering relevant messages to an individual based on registered user data, on a specific identifiable device and doing all that at scale, basically, means that marketing will evolve beyond all recognition over the next decade. From ‘marketing to the many’ to the ‘marketing of the individual’ will virtually eradicate wastage and revolutionise the way we interact with consumers and augment their online experiences. All sounds very ‘Minority Report’ doesn’t it?

Since the advent and meteoric rise of programmatic over the past few years, we have used technology to reach consumers much more efficiently. However maybe, as an industry, we didn’t focus enough on how effective the messaging could be by harnessing the power of personalisation.

Research from Adobe suggests that some marketers already believe they understand the role of personalisation in the buying process – according to their numbers, around 83% of retail marketers think they do a decent job in personalising experiences for consumers. Conversely, consumers clearly don’t agree, as only 29% of them feel that retailers effectively offer them personalised content or offers. Patently there is a disturbing disparity between client perception and customer reality.

TECH VS REAL WORLD

No one would argue that technology could ever really replace the prominence of real world experiences and the need to truly understand consumer need states and motivations. But, as the event organisers put it:

“Even though there are still some things in consumers’ lives that do not look digital at first glance and perhaps may never become digital, we are convinced that everything — including the relationship between consumers and brands — can be further improved through digitisation”.

So, if the solution lies in the enhancement of the online experience to make it more idiosyncratic and engaging for the consumer then that begs another question – how do marketers achieve that enhanced experience?

The answer is to make the experiences more powerful, consistent, sustainable and meaningful. The research is clear that Gen Y consumers prefer experiences to possessions and actually want brands to interact with them. In fact, according to Google, 16% of them actually want you to provide decent content so that they can share it with their friends.

Of course, there are already some excellent examples of clients who are already adopting a more customised approach to delivering personalised content to their consumers. For example, starting in Denmark, McDonald’s have begun the move away from pure demographics and started focusing on behaviour and needs in order to become much more relevant and targeted. They have adapted their marketing to highlight every single moment in a customer’s daily media usage and apply a ‘My McDonald’s’ strategy instead of a ‘Mass McDonald’s’ approach delivering dynamic creative messages at the right time, to the right person, on the right platform.

The point is that although there are some pockets of excellence around the globe, the reality is that many marketers haven’t yet embarked upon this kind of transformational journey towards enhanced personal online experiences. A panel moderated by Adweek will debate this very topic featuring speakers from IBM, Publicis and OMD entitled ‘Changing Marketing Agency Landscape: Building the most rewarding customer experiences‘. It may well prove to be a rallying cry for the industry and a catalyst for accelerated adoption of personalisation.

PERSONALISE OR DIE

To conclude, I decided to garner the opinion of a leading marketer from one of the world’s biggest advertisers. Bastien Schupp, vice president of global marketing communications at Groupe Renault, made it very clear that agencies and marketers who fail to react positively to this paradigm shift will be the ones who ultimately lose out.

“Communicating with individuals is undoubtedly the single biggest challenge ahead of us. The transformation of the creative and media buying processes will profoundly disrupt the way we do marketing. Getting big agency and client organisations to adapt to this change will define who stays in the game.”

The message is simple and somewhat stark. Personalise or die.

This article was originally posted on M&M Global.

We asked Matt Adlard, a Senior Planner who works on the Luxottica account, four questions to understand a bit more about what he does in his spare time as the ‘Topless Baker’, a half dressed chef who live streams weekly cooking shows on Meerkat. Matt has been recognised as one of the top live streamers by AdWeek who described him as a ‘live streaming star that every brand should get to know’; he has also spoken at the Festival of Marketing about how brands should use live streaming. These questions cover Matt’s live streaming journey and what he has learned along the way.

1. How did you get into live streaming and why Topless Baker?

We were doing research for Oakley about what owned social channels they should look at in 2016, and came across Periscope and Meerkat. There were some reservations that starting a new social channel would be worth the investment in terms of increased engagement.

I had started a blog, ‘Topless Baker’, earlier in the year, combining my love of food and exercise, and saw this as a perfect opportunity to demonstrate to the client how effective it could be. I knew I had a huge first-mover advantage and I could gain traction quickly so I ran home that night and the rest is history!

2. So what did Oakley think about all of this?

We presented the business case to them and they were very impressed. Within three months, I had 20,000 followers on Meerkat and 1,800 on Instagram with an engagement rate above 30% per post.

When presenting this to Oakley, we were able to demonstrate that by creating authentic, engaging content, you could drive increased social engagement and organic reach, with minimal investment or paid media required.

3. What are the benefits of live streaming and why should brands be using it?

Although it might be hard to see how brands can relate to ‘topless baking’, there are key lessons and benefits that can be applied to any brand.

First is the ability to drive increased engagement above and beyond traditional social channels. Consumers are hyper-savvy nowadays – especially the millennial audience. They are looking for engaging, authentic content that they can’t find anywhere else. The challenge we face with many traditional media channels is that it is a ‘one to many’ conversation – live streaming is the exact opposite and it allows you to have direct conversations with fans in real time, which drives huge engagement compared to traditional social channels.

Take OMD’s client Sony Pictures for example: everybody sees the actors going down the red carpet at premieres and can look at photos online, but imagine if fans could get insight into what happens behind closed doors at the event? Seth Rogan could Periscope to fans behind the scenes taking questions about his latest film release, giving exclusive insight that couldn’t be found elsewhere.

Secondly, you will learn more about your audience in one hour than you will through any traditional media. Thanks to the real-time nature of live streaming, you can react to fans’ questions or comments on the go, allowing you to be ‘creatively reactive’. You will learn what your consumers do or do not like about your channel quickly, which in turn allows you to adjust your content accordingly for your next episode.

Finally: the ability to drive cross-channel reach. By asking followers on Twitter what you should do in your next stream, or posting footage and images from the stream on Instagram afterwards, you can leverage live streaming across multiple touchpoints which in turn increases reach beyond the original channels.

4. What advice would you give to brands looking to live stream?

The key piece of advice to brands is to be brave. There is still a huge first mover advantage within live streaming and brands need to be bold enough to take the first step.

Brands are very much used to having complete control over content, being able to filter, cut and edit footage to make sure it is perfect; however this is exactly what a live streaming audience doesn’t want to see. They want to see brands in their unfiltered, natural state, and although there are uncertainties around this, by taking that first step before competitors a brand can reap the rewards.