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Marketing commandments to regain consumers’ trust in 2019

March 8, 2019

For several years, consumers’ feelings of uncertainty and anxiety for the future have been compounded by fears for the effects of human behaviour on the environment. This feeling of uncertainty, which has, in fact, become quite normal and is referred to as the ‘’#neveralnormal’’, is reflected in consumers’ lack of trust in established institutions and brands. As we all have seen in the newspapers, familiar brands are experiencing difficulties, with many household names going into administration, and a downturn in Europe’s share of the Top 250 global retailer’s revenues since 2006.

Economic uncertainty, political tension, environmental change and the 4th industrial revolution have been the main forces of dramatic change. The Gilets Jaunes/French Yellow Vests protests in France, the arrival of a populist government in Italy and Brexit in the UK all reflect deep-seated political and economic discontent.

With further political upheaval expected in 2019, consumers’ crisis of trust is deepening, and leading to greater emotional involvement and action.

This brings us to a set of marketing “commandments” to meet the new consumer’s expectations.

COMMANDMENT 1: CONTENT, CONTEXT AND CONTACTS

To retain consumer trust, brands must be mindful of the context for their adverts. If they are placed next to unethical content, they stand the risk of being accused of being linked too or even funding that content, and consumer trust will inevitably be affected.

Content-wise, brands have been accused of condoning “fake” news by running their adverts next to it and inadvertently financing it at the same time. It has been argued that advertisers are unaware of what content their adverts in fact support, but Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, suggests that this is a weak excuse, calling it, in fact, a “moral failure”:

The third element “contacts” shows that the number of times an advert is run also impacts trust. In 2017, Forbes showed that the average consumer is exposed to up to 10,000 brand messages a day.

OMD Latvia conducted an online bespoke quantitative study to illustrate this point at the Mi:t&Links. Conference FALSE THINKING conference in Riga, March the 8^th.

63% of 18-75 years old living in Latvia claim seeing the ad too many times reduces Trust in Advertising

COMMANDMENT 2: BE CLEAR AND DELIVER ON YOUR PROMISE

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect in May 2018, underlines the importance of consumer trust, giving consumers more control over their data at the same time as offering reassurance that these are in safe hands. In 2018, IBM ran a study, which showed that 73% of people were concerned about their privacy on internet sites and 65% did not trust social media companies to handle personal data responsibly. GDPR could be regarded as a simple compliance issue, but it could also be seen as a catalyst for businesses to implement new business models with consumer trust at their core.

With the advent of AI and fast developing technology, like 5G, transparency has become particularly important owing to the potential misuse of an increasing amount of new data that are intended to provide a more personal approach, as well as delivering the ultimate in modern living standards in our homes. If data is handled badly, consumer trust will inevitably be lost. The downside of GDPR, however, is that data protection is couched in legal terms that laymen find difficult to understand, highlighting a need for simplification.

COMMANDMENT 3: AUTHENTICITY IS THE KEY TO SUCCESSFUL COLLABORATION

One example of a lack of authenticity took place in September 2018 when renowned social media influencer Scarlett Dixon was paid to promote Listerine on her Instagram page. Whilst she highlighted that the post was an ad, she was highly criticised for the content being completely staged. After all, who wakes up with perfect make up and hair, balloons next to their bed and Listerine on their bedside table?

Instead of relying on celebrities to bump up their sales, brands are now turning to nano-influencers: everyday consumers who tell small communities of friends about their favourite products, thus creating trusted content for brands. Kate Edwards, the COO of the social marketing technology startup, Heartbeat, explains how it works, “Brands have always known that word-of-mouth marketing works well, but it hasn’t been until now that we’ve had the technology to activate this channel in a scalable, cost-effective way. That’s why brands are moving away from influencers and celebrities, and more toward recognising the voices of everyday consumers.” In addition, CGI avatars are beginning to replace human influencers. Examples include the virtual models, Lil Miquela and Shudu, who engage with their fans just like any human influencer would, maintaining transparency and building trust.

COMMANDMENT 4: ACT AS A GOOD CITIZEN WOULD

Brands should see themselves as individuals with moral values. For instance, in October 2017, Corona came out in support of its native country, Mexico, following a devastating earthquake. It re-branded three million beer cans as “Mexico Extra” and donated the proceeds to reconstruction projects. It also encouraged involvement with relief projects through its website mexicoextra.com.

COMMANDMENT 5: STAND OUT FOR A POINT OF VIEW

As social media gives louder voices to extreme views, brands are asked more and more to standout for a point of view.

Taking inspiration from the Me Too Movement, in January 2019 the shaving brand Gillette launched a new ad campaign which features a nearly 2-minute-long video drawing inspiration from the Me Too movement by tackling issues like sexual harassment, bullying and toxic masculinity. Reactions on social media have been mixed. There are many people praising the video for encouraging all men to do the right thing. However, it also has many people threatening to boycott the company, accusing them of lumping men into one group, painting a bad picture for men all over the world.

Another example of a brand assuming a moral stance was when Nike chose Kaepernick to front their 30th anniversary poster. The well-known footballer had brought attention to police brutality against African-Americans by kneeling down during the national anthem and refusing to “show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour”. Nike came out in support of his decision to stand up for his personal beliefs.

COMMANDMENT 6: DEVELOP GREATER EMPATHETIC UNDERSTANDING

As we all know, marketing is moving from “mass to me”. At OMD, we believe that every interaction a consumer has with a brand represents an opportunity to create a valuable relationship, with “empathy”, the backbone of trust, being key.

As planners who design end-to-end consumer experience to create valued relationships between brands and their consumers, we at OMD try to anticipate consumer needs through a deep understanding of our audiences, their untapped needs and desires, exploring ways in which a brand can use communications and media to fulfil them.

OMD PREDICTS

OMD predicts that in the future we will increasingly see engineered empathy as a key driver of success. As consumers are feeling more comfortable with AI and robots, they will be expecting emotional interactions from brands through AI. Empathetic services that help deliver human-like interactions in all contexts, by adapting to the customer’s real time emotional state, will be always welcomed by consumers.

But until then…get the principles right: Be credible, transparent, reliable and consumer first seem to be some of the main key drivers of consumers’ trust. And then…be aware of the trust corrode-rs that advertising is in control of and follow, if appropriate, the above suggested commandments.

The top 4 key trends from PI Live 2018

November 2, 2018

emeaops

Earlier this month, thousands of marketers descended upon London’s Old Billingsgate to attend PI Live. This annual conference is one of the largest performance marketing events in the UK, and garners attendees from advertiser, media owner, agency, tech (and beyond!) to listen to talks from industry heads, participate in conversation on our rapidly-changing industry and give attendees an unparalleled opportunity to meet with their partners.

PI Live in numbers:

2,500 delegates in attendance, from 60 countries
1,868 meetings scheduled in the PI LIVE event app
392 questions asked to Keynote speakers via the app

As well as big brands from the world of digital advertising like Snapchat, Adidas, Net-A-Porter and Groupon, OMD EMEA Affiliates was represented by Alexander Head, Matilde Magalhaes-Cruz and Hailey Talbot-Tittle.

We wrapped up the 4 trends we saw at the event which are also very relevant to any clients in the digital sphere who aren’t currently running affiliate activity!

Key Trends from PI Live in 2018:

Cyber Week: As strong as ever, and growing on the continent

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the largest shopping days in eCommerce in the western market, so naturally Cyber Week was on everyone’s lips in keynotes and meetings. AWIN’s Robert Davison discussed how brands have had to adapt to changing consumer habits, as consumers have become increasingly price conscious and savvy about how they buy their online goods, as well as the necessity of clients to choose to join in or sit out, depending on their brand goals.

Affiliates like HotUKDeals, TopCashback and Vouchercodes.co.uk are incredibly efficient in converting users to purchase in the presence of an offer. If your client is running an offer for Cyber Week, is the affiliate channel on your plan? If not, they are missing out on capitalising on the largest traffic driving event of the year, and only paying on a CPA when genuine sales have happened.

It’s safe to say that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are very much cemented in the psyche of the UK population now, but markets on the continent have rapidly been adopting this holiday too. France, for example, has seen a 74% increase in sales in 2017 vs 2016, Italy saw an increase of 80% and Sweden grew by 104%. This holiday is showing no signs of slowing down, so our role as trusted advisors to our clients needs be to find the best opportunities for growth at the best price, whilst maintaining brand integrity.

Singles Day: China’s Largest Shopping Event

Although Cyber Week is the crown jewel in what many refer to as the ‘Golden Quarter’ in the western world, the largest shopping day in the world is on the Single’s Day in China. The date, November 11th (11/11), was chosen because the number “1” resembles an individual who is alone. $25.4 billion of goods were purchased from Alibaba alone in 2017 – which is an increase of 42% YoY. With such significant volumes and growth, the European eCommerce space is abuzz with how they can participate in this extremely important shopping event.

High-end and Luxury have seen huge new market in China, with a major luxury affiliate network reporting a 33% increase in the number of British Luxury goods sold on Singles Day 2017 vs. 2016, and greater growth expected this year.

Data from AWIN’s Keynote reported that 45% of shoppers are expected to purcahse online from non-domestic brands by 2020, so publishers with a strong APAC userbase like Dealmoon and RedScarf are ideal candidates to globalize any retailer’s global ecommerce performance.

Therefore, if your client is looking to get involved, the affiliate channel is uniquely positioned to help your client establish partnerships and enable promotional offers and content in this region on a risk-free Cost-per-Action basis!

Rebuilding Client CRM Post-GDPR on Pure Performance

Many in the digital realm have been affected in different ways by GDPR, with many losing valuable customer data from their database. With advertisers rightly keeping their cards close to their chest on quite how much they each had lost, one thing is clear, there is a need from advertisers to rebuild their 1^st Party Data.

This is why so many advertisers are interested in Lead Generation via the Performance Channel this year! Lead Generation partners are helping advertisers rebuild GDPR compliant databases for clients on a Cost-Per-Lead basis, meaning that the client only pay’s when a valid lead is driven.
This results in a risk-free source of new customers who are engaged and interested in hearing more via email. This data can also be used to expand 1^st Party marketing efforts in different channels.

The ability to build a GDPR compliant database and only pay for valid leads on a Cost-per-Lead basis is a huge opportunity for all clients in the business. If your client has lost any volume of users to GDPR, or is looking to bolster their already existing database, our team is experienced in delivering campaigns across all advertiser verticals and would love to speak to you!

Influencer Marketing: A huge opportunity via the Affiliate Channel

The biggest change this year was the was the number of partners offering Influencer Marketing. With the majority of the talks on Day Two focussing on the incrementality, measurement and value of influencers both in silo and in the larger brand experience – it’s safe to say that the industry is primed and ready to deliver influencer campaigns.

There were a dizzying array of Influencer Networks exhibiting at the event, and as many of these networks offer very similar services or platforms, the difference between each platform can be hard to distinguish.

Every client is looking to support their campaigns with Influencer Marketing, and affiliate marketing is an incredible avenue for advertisers to establish partnerships with networks or influencers directly and provide real-time tracking of performance, again on a risk-free CPA payment method. If your client is talking Influencer, have you considered running it via our affiliate team to deliver their campaign efficiently?

Therefore, the role of an agency such as OMD EMEA is especially critical in this field – our ability to curate potential partnerships and measure their impact outside of the affiliate channel as a silo enables clients to optimise towards the most successful outcomes for influencer marketing campaigns, whilst maintaining that visibility and brand security stay front of mind.

A conversation on DMEXCO 2018

September 14, 2018

emeaops

We sent Piers Drake, our Head of eCommerce, and Chelsea Horncastle, our Senior Product Innovation Manager and AI/AR specialist, to Cologne to check-out DMEXCO 2018. Here they discuss what they found:

Piers Drake: So, Chelsea, that was a busy couple of days; my Fitbit tells me we covered 15miles lapping the halls of the Koelnmesse! Other than aching feet, the overall theme that jumped out for me was one of retrenching in these post-GDPR times. ‘Take CARE’ was the DMEXCO tag line, and every other booth had the words ‘Safety’ and ‘Transparency’ written large on their displays, with a somewhat apologetic tone!

Chelsea Horncastle: On top of which the keynotes were frequently referencing the disruption of data, gender inequality and the bleak outlook for retail! Quite negative thematically, but the atmosphere was actually very optimistic and buzzy, particularly when it came to the application of newer tech to consumer problems. And the halls were absolutely packed!

PD: Definitely. This was a transitional year for the industry I think. For me personally, the most interesting and positive stuff was when we dug below the surface and asked the exhibitors what they had coming down the pipeline for 2019. I think we found the seeds of some very cool tech and new approaches, but these weren’t always obvious from browsing the displays.

CH: The narrative that kept coming up with vendors, Google and AWS for example, was getting the appropriate infrastructure in place now to take advantage of the vast amounts of data – video, images, and more – already being collected. Also making voice and visual search technology more accessible, and using it to free up people’s time rather than for it’s own sake. I think the story of the next 12 months will be baby steps around implementation of these technologies at scale.

PD: One exhibitor that brought this to life for me was Oath, who were demoing their AR content via Ryot Studio and HoloLens. Beyond the novelty of playing with virtual Smurfs (!), crucially they were talking confidently about the need to unite the content and publishing with an ‘insights engine’ of data in the background; what I’d call an end-to-end approach.

CH: Yep. The tech is impressive, but we need to move beyond the ‘cool technology’ angle and take it back to consumer insights – what are our goals with using these new formats and how do they help real consumers? And, AI can generate insights from big datasets, which is one of the most actionable ‘today’ applications.

PD: Thinking real-world applications, I was excited by the computer vision and ‘visual search’ tools we saw from Google, Microsoft and a number of startups. The Google Lens demo was particularly good because they were emphasising the practical uses, for example where you can identify plants or shoes or paintings with a tap, but then the UI drives you directly to other Google tools such as Shopping, Maps or Translate for the next steps. It’s going to be a great timesaver AND drive business results.

CH: Google Lens is great! On the B2B side, we saw Microsoft analysing the faces of people walking past their stand and estimating their genders, ages and moods – all in real time. This kind of real time analysis of video is a potential gamechanger for lots of industries, retail in particular.

PD: Yes, let’s talk retail! eCommerce vendors were dotted around the show and my main takeaway was that online retail is no longer an awkward cousin of digital! Everybody is talking about commerce outcomes, trying to explicitly link investment to sales (at last!)

CH: Ha! eCommerce seems much more mainstream this year and I heard a lot about AI-led personalisation. Salesforce were talking about ‘Shoptimism’ and the benefits of AI-driven recommendations on online stores, with their data showing a 5x transaction value from that.

PD: Whether it’s via human curation, AI or a hybrid – recommendations and personalised experiences are a key area where rivals can offer something different to Amazon. They had a sizeable presence at the show but were characteristically reluctant to discuss their plans. The explosive growth of their Amazon Advertising platform was a frequent topic of conversation with third party tool providers like Kenshoo, who told me that Amazon Search is growing at 10x the rate of Google Search.

CH: From my side, I was surprised that Alexa was invisible among the other AI assistant demos on show. Meanwhile, you said eBay had some interesting ideas when you spoke to them?

PD: I think eBay is one to watch as they are launching new tools and trying to shift perceptions of it as a ‘second hand’ eCommerce platform – their data is that over 80% of product sold is brand new. They already have an upper-funnel proposition and potentially it could evolve into a brand-friendly ‘end-to-end’ platform that offers more control over the shopping experience than Amazon.

CH: Let’s talk social for a moment. Facebook, LinkedIn and Snapchat were all there. Snapchat was the most low-key of these, mainly letting the product do the talking. Facebook were primarily featuring Instagram and Blueprint, showing some neat upgrades to IG Stories with more animation and motion.

PD: Social was a little low-key all round. I was surprised by the lack of messaging platforms around DMEXCO given the predictions of how ‘conversational UI’ was going to be big by now. And social commerce was invisible. We’re out of time unfortunately, so what was your highlight overall?

CH: Overall, it was a demo that sparked my imagination. That is the best part of attending conferences like Dmexco. This demo used image recognition to create a connected car experience, where it could understand what people see as they drive past buildings giving additional information or actions as needed. The idea is still very new, but it allows us to think about what the future could look like. And, yours?

PD: It’s slightly off-the-wall, but one of the most crowded and best-looking stands was a replica of a general store with tins, bottles and bags of pasta on display, with ‘shopkeepers.’ The popularity of it really captured for me why the eCommerce story is becoming about joining online up with physical retail – because despite all the info available online, people love browsing real shops….and going to trade shows like DMEXCO!