In the new “Data Never Sleeps” report, it was revealed 694,444 hours of Netflix are watched every minute. But competition is heating up, as the ‘streaming wars’ get more intense.
This week, news broke that Disney+ is set to launch before the end of the year, Netflix has poached the Game of Thrones creators, and Apple TV’s upcoming show ‘The Morning Show’ is reported to be worth a whopping $240 million. Facebook also want a piece of the action, testing subscriptions on Facebook Watch.
With so many players entering the game, who will be dominating the streaming service market come 2020?
Mixing music with a twist…Bacardi ‘hacks’ YouTube to launch The Beat Machine.
Search and press play! Google now includes podcast episodes in search bar
The future of TV is going mobile: ‘vertical dramas’ are being created specifically for phone viewing.
Keep up with your favourite Twitter rant, as the platform tests a ‘subscribe to thread’ feature.
Hip-hop dancers paint Paris in a new light with Google’s ‘Dance View’ to celebrate Gare de Lyon’s 170th anniversary.
Have you cut the cord? Report shows streaming services have gained 13.3 million subscribers in the UK.
Going, going, gone! Verizon sells Tumblr to WordPress owner Automattic Inc. for $3 million.
The future of Snapchat is bright! ‘Spectacles 3’ is here, with a hefty price tag of $380.
We can all feel how the search landscape is changing. Every day I hear a new stat – 50% of search in 2020 will be voice, search queries are getting longer with 50% now over four words, and using an image within search results increases the likelihood of conversion by up to 40%. I could go on.
Search is the primary indicator of changing consumer behaviour. It is estimated that people today interact with up to 200 digital touchpoints before visiting a store or completing a purchase online. The conversion path is now so dynamic that when we consider partners, we need to react with it. The stat that even some of my most sophisticated clients raise an eyebrow at is that 40% of product searches are direct to Amazon vs. Google, which receives 30%.
So what does this mean for the brands and advertisers? How do big and small players prepare for the battle? How do they make sure they stay in the search game and win the consumer amid the digital pollution and noise of the competition?
Shopper marketing vs. channel marketing
The answer, first and foremost, lies in focusing on shopper marketing vs. channel marketing.
One way to achieve this is to embrace the ‘holistic search’ approach, not only by integrating paid and organic search into a single search strategy, but also by rolling it out into the broader search ecosystem beyond ‘traditional’ search engines.
For example, OMD has delivered this approach for Bacardi by expanding its search activities directly into its retailer domains using Criteo’s machine learning technology (formerly known as HookLogic). The campaign helped the brand to overcome the fierce competition on the retailer sites and delivered outstanding results – over 700% ROAS and gaining half of the market share for the promoted products.
Levi’s closely follow suit, and has taken a step further to penetrate the ‘walled gardens’ of Amazon Search (AMS) in a bid to overcome the crowded organic space and firmly establish its dominance on Amazon. But despite endless commercial opportunities on Amazon, the challenges for search marketers are immense – AMS activation and management is fundamentally different from that on ‘traditional search engines’.
To overcome this challenge, OMD teamed up with Levi’s and Kenshoo, as a product design partner, to help the development of the AMS management solution which allows for AMS campaign management on scale. Within a month of on-boarding, OMD managed to scale up Levi’s AMS campaigns increasing traffic by 500% and delivering 4x more sales. As a result, Levi’s is now considering including AMS into the framework of its always-on search strategy.
So while media players continue the race of innovation to meet the modern consumer’s expectation of immediate access to information and goods at the snap of their fingers (or voice!), search evolves as an organic part of daily life.
Approaching search holistically
It is therefore important that brands and marketers start approaching search holistically in the context of the consumer path to purchase. Multi-channel API integrations, pursued by marketing software companies, marketing analytics and attribution solutions, can help in providing adequate measurement framework to understand the impact of each channel on overall search performance.
This may not be achieved overnight while many brands still operate in silos with little collaboration between brand and performance marketing, and a lack of coordination between marketing and merchandising or the online and offline. However, marketers are best positioned to lead clients towards consumer-centric strategies using the wealth of cross-vertical expertise and technology solutions they possess.
The Cannes Festival will soon be upon us and for the last three years the OMD Oasis has had the unprecedented reputation of offering our clients and guests exclusive access to some of the most exciting thought leaders, tech and media partners, along with visionaries from across our industry. These trailblazers are known key players in the redefinition of ours and our clients’ business.
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These trailblazers are known key players in the redefinition of ours and our clients’ business. This year, OMD will focus on how we define, inspire and action brands with purpose and authenticity; with talks on storytelling, insight-led marketing, diversity and innovation involving clients and partners from the worlds of television, tech, social and Silicon Valley.
In addition to the most forward-thinking industry leaders, we’ve confirmed a number of A-List celebrities, themselves important brands—Gwyneth Paltrow, Ryan Seacrest, Anderson Cooper, Brett Favre, to name a few … who will talk about the real and immediate need for authenticity.
A number of our global clients including Activision, Bacardi, Barilla, Google, HPE, Intel, Nissan and PepsiCo will give us first-hand insight into what has become a truly transformative era in our industry and how they are embracing these challenges and drive growth.
We hope to see you there in-person, but if you are unable to attend, you can join us online as we will bring you real-time coverage of the OMD Oasis and the Lions Festival at the Palais across the entire week. Please join the conversation by following the hashtag #OMDOASIS or point your cursor to cannes.omd.com for the full agenda and roster of speakers.
Thank you from all of us at OMD!