Whilst the idea of personalised communication isn’t exactly new news, we in Create think this will grow to pretty epic proportions.
Not sure about personalised marketing? What if we told you content featuring a targeted call-to-action performed 178% better than a generic call-to-action. Not only do these personalised messages deliver better performance, they are also preferred by customers. 50% of U.S. consumers say they prefer receiving personalised marketing messages and 91% are more likely to shop with brands who send personalised offers.
As the volume of branded content across platforms continues to grow, so too does user ‘blindness’ to content that doesn’t immediately resonate. This increasingly competitive environment for consumer attention will force brands to invest more time, resource and money in to content that is crafted to meet the preferences and behaviours of specific groups of consumers. The ability to deliver this content is driven by both user preference, but also more sophisticated targeting technology.
How?
Firstly, via data collection: Using data to better understand your consumers provides the stimulus for a content strategy that more accurately caters to their actual desires.
Alternatively, a technology solution: For example, dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) is a set of technologies that massively simplifies the process of tailoring content experiences for consumers in real-time. With this capability, advertisers can reach target audiences with potentially infinite unique creative variations that cater to the specific user being served the ad, without the legwork you’d expect.
What’s more, the emerging ability to use DCO in native advertising campaigns brings a powerful tactic, enabling brands to tailor each component of the content their audience is exposed to. Marketing is hopefully about to become far more relevant, and therefore hopefully both more effective and worth your audience’s time.
In a rather classy venue, ironically nestled under a railway bridge close to London’s Borough market, during Social Media Week (Sept 11-15), I went along to discover how major brands, publishers and agencies are working to reinvent storytelling and how they plan to deal with ever-changing modern consumption habits.
A diverse panel helped jumpstart discussions. Luisa Mauro from LADbible-owned site, Pretty 52, sat alongside Charles Ubaghs from Global, and OMD UK’s XMP digital manager Charles McNeill, armed with a media perspective and case studies from arguably the greatest storyteller of all, Walt Disney himself.
I went to quite a few talks this year at SMW (to the dislike of my liver but the benefit of my brain) and above all else retained two clear points. which were echoed by nearly all of those presenting; that of personalized experiences and ensuring your audiences was the right ones. Unsurprisingly, these two points formed the backbone of the talk and some of the guiding principles that kept coming up during the week.
Don’t talk to the masses – get up close and personal.
Millennials and Gen-Zers came up in conversation – as these buzzword age groups always seem to – and highlighted the need to address the boom in mobile consumption and the many mediums that younger audiences use. The new screen is the mobile screen and it’s key for brands to stop employing old TVC habits of marketing and embrace mobile-ready content campaigns. It’s by using new social media and tech platforms in creative and out of the box ways to deliver content, says Ubaghs, that will help keep storytelling at the heart of digital content and maintain that coveted essence of authenticity that brands seem to all want.
We’ve been hearing this from Facebook too: best practice recommendations suggest that the effectiveness and resonance of content is largely dependent on whether the content is optimized for social media or not. Largely, brands that are still opening up to being more present on social media need to ensure that they don’t simply slap a traditional, long format TVC on their social channels and instead re-edit and re-cut content to suit the social platform they are deploying their content on.
McNeill also says that it’s essential that content is digested by the right audiences, and that different KPIs are associated with each group – this seems to be particularly valuable to the Walt Disney Company. At the heart of his talk was the importance of custom campaigns for each audience, thereby allowing the story to flow as naturally as possible.
Storytelling is an integral part of the work that we at OMD Create, a specialist social and content arm, undertake for The Walt Disney Company. Leading on social analytics across 26 markets with more than 17-million combined fans, we have huge volumes of content we report on and help develop in conjunction with Disney. Moreover, we operate within the vast Kid’s Entertainment space which this year to date has generated more than 15-billion views alone. What we find across multiple content themes is that telling a story is as every bit relevant to an unboxing video as it is to a song compilation; this is how we captivate our audiences and ensure they always come back for more.
Talk with your audience, not to them.
As marketers, we sometimes get too focused on driving results and forget about the consumers we’re trying to impact. a human audience that’s not focused on CPC metric but about how a brand makes them feel and what a brand can do for them. McNeill adds that we need to ensure we know what content has already been served to our custom audiences – have they previously re-engaged with our stories and if so, to what extent does this dampen their opinion of us? We strive at OMD Create to do exactly this, by keeping our partners such as Facebook close to us when working on the optimization of campaigns to keep our metrics close, and our audiences closer.
What all panelists did solidly agree on was on the primary way of measuring how successful their storytelling has been. Their golden metric as described by the moderator was shares. Why? In the eyes of the panelists, people sharing content was synonymous to putting their name on it, to regarding it as something worthy of their own friends and audience and something that has generated enough interest to spark conversation.
So what about the future? It’s a space that marketers can win in if agencies are able to help their clients tell stories while using insights to help guide content. Also if they are able to ensure that this content is customized to suit the audiences they are trying to reach while at the same time embracing ever-changing technology. The only limitations lie within ourselves, whether we dare experiment with the tools and process we have in place.
We’re not always going to win, but we won’t lose by keeping on our toes.
For more information regarding OMD EMEA or anything you’ve read here please contact us at [email protected]
In a rather classy venue, ironically nestled under a railway bridge close to London’s Borough market, during Social Media Week (Sept 11-15), I went along to discover how major brands, publishers and agencies are working to reinvent storytelling and how they plan to deal with ever-changing modern consumption habits.
A diverse panel helped jumpstart discussions. Luisa Mauro from LADbible-owned site, Pretty 52, sat alongside Charles Ubaghs from Global, and OMD UK’s XMP digital manager Charles McNeill, armed with a media perspective and case studies from arguably the greatest storyteller of all, Walt Disney himself.
I went to quite a few talks this year at SMW (to the dislike of my liver but the benefit of my brain) and above all else retained two clear points. which were echoed by nearly all of those presenting; that of personalized experiences and ensuring your audiences was the right ones. Unsurprisingly, these two points formed the backbone of the talk and some of the guiding principles that kept coming up during the week.
Don’t talk to the masses – get up close and personal.
Millennials and Gen-Zers came up in conversation – as these buzzword age groups always seem to – and highlighted the need to address the boom in mobile consumption and the many mediums that younger audiences use. The new screen is the mobile screen and it’s key for brands to stop employing old TVC habits of marketing and embrace mobile-ready content campaigns. It’s by using new social media and tech platforms in creative and out of the box ways to deliver content, says Ubaghs, that will help keep storytelling at the heart of digital content and maintain that coveted essence of authenticity that brands seem to all want.
We’ve been hearing this from Facebook too: best practice recommendations suggest that the effectiveness and resonance of content is largely dependent on whether the content is optimized for social media or not. Largely, brands that are still opening up to being more present on social media need to ensure that they don’t simply slap a traditional, long format TVC on their social channels and instead re-edit and re-cut content to suit the social platform they are deploying their content on.
McNeill also says that it’s essential that content is digested by the right audiences, and that different KPIs are associated with each group – this seems to be particularly valuable to the Walt Disney Company. At the heart of his talk was the importance of custom campaigns for each audience, thereby allowing the story to flow as naturally as possible.
Storytelling is an integral part of the work that we at OMD Create, a specialist social and content arm, undertake for The Walt Disney Company. Leading on social analytics across 26 markets with more than 17-million combined fans, we have huge volumes of content we report on and help develop in conjunction with Disney. Moreover, we operate within the vast Kid’s Entertainment space which this year to date has generated more than 15-billion views alone. What we find across multiple content themes is that telling a story is as every bit relevant to an unboxing video as it is to a song compilation; this is how we captivate our audiences and ensure they always come back for more.
Talk with your audience, not to them.
As marketers, we sometimes get too focused on driving results and forget about the consumers we’re trying to impact. a human audience that’s not focused on CPC metric but about how a brand makes them feel and what a brand can do for them. McNeill adds that we need to ensure we know what content has already been served to our custom audiences – have they previously re-engaged with our stories and if so, to what extent does this dampen their opinion of us? We strive at OMD Create to do exactly this, by keeping our partners such as Facebook close to us when working on the optimization of campaigns to keep our metrics close, and our audiences closer.
What all panelists did solidly agree on was on the primary way of measuring how successful their storytelling has been. Their golden metric as described by the moderator was shares. Why? In the eyes of the panelists, people sharing content was synonymous to putting their name on it, to regarding it as something worthy of their own friends and audience and something that has generated enough interest to spark conversation.
So what about the future? It’s a space that marketers can win in if agencies are able to help their clients tell stories while using insights to help guide content. Also if they are able to ensure that this content is customized to suit the audiences they are trying to reach while at the same time embracing ever-changing technology. The only limitations lie within ourselves, whether we dare experiment with the tools and process we have in place.
We’re not always going to win, but we won’t lose by keeping on our toes.
For more information regarding OMD EMEA or anything you’ve read here please contact us at [email protected]
2017 marked both the 50th anniversary and my first attendance to CES. I couldn’t have been more excited to see it all in action. Whilst it seemed nearly impossible to experience every single inch of the vast booths of new tech, entrepreneurs, and titans of innovation, the OMD Word team and I eagerly explored as much as possible, gaining several thousand steps on our wearables in the process.
It comes as no surprise, CES delivered on being a fantastic incubator for viewing trends within innovation. As these trends reach mass consumers, social media becomes the hotbed capturing consumers’ responses and participation within these trends. Three key themes continuously bubbled up to the top when walking the conference. While not entirely new to the world of CES, these themes have the capability of reshaping consumers’ behaviour on social media. We’ll call them the three A’s of CES 2017: Autonomous, AI, and the prospective bell of the ball, Alexa.
First up, Autonomous
Autonomous cars increased in sophistication and the metaphorical road got way more crowded this year. After achieving the ability to take consumers from one place to another, the focus expanded to how these vehicles could communicate with each other making transportation even safer and more efficient by reducing traffic buildups. How consumers will occupy their time once the physical act of driving is removed as a necessity still remains to be seen. But it allows for a variety of entertainment and connection opportunities via a new touch point of consumers’ attention.
AI
Throughout the conference, AI weaved its way across robotics, to self-driving cars, to health and fitness, and everything in between. With the ever-growing surge of big data, 2017 AI fosters personalization of experiences across robotic home companions, sleep technology, and intelligent assistants. Even better, the more these AI devices learn and interact with consumers the smarter they become. This especially rings true within health and fitness, where there was a large presence of ingredient brands to grow the market of bio feedback. Gamification of health and fitness nurtures the socialisation of precise bio feedback potentially popping up on social platforms, as consumers have increased motivation to do better and beat out their friends and family.
Alexa
With the rise of voice activation technology, such as Alexa, consumers will be given new tools and ways to connect within their social spheres generating new types of shareable content. Both editorial publishers and social platforms alike will be responsible for finding the interesting and compelling way to share the new consumer experiences. Practically at every turn, companies were trying to dovetail voice activation tech, Alexa specifically, to their products in conventional and unconventional ways. Voice analytics, including emotional tracking through voice, was lightly sprinkled through the conference creating opportunities for consumers to deepen their understanding of their social interactions both within the physical and digital world.
As the three A’s of CES 2017 continue to trickle out to mass consumers, cultural adoption of connected, intelligent devices across multiple touch points within their lives will advance. With the ease of connecting to everything and the sheer immediacy of it, one hypothesis I have is consumers’ social platform behaviours will start to merge and be less siloed. Consumers’ mindsets will shift from needing to share a specific, individual piece of content across a specific social platform, to having a multi-pronged experience to share across their social ecosystem. In this collapse of the more traditional existing social silos, social platforms will need to adapt to the new consumer demand of a social ecosystem rather than an echo chamber. However in the true spirit of innovation at CES and perpetually dynamic nature of human social behaviours, only time will tell if I’m right or wrong.
Similar to previous years, the social platforms themselves got in on the action of CES.
Facebook lead the pack as the “official” social media partner of CES 2017. Pumping out exhaustive editorial content, on-site interviews, and virtual tours, Facebook served the role of a crucial resource of information for attendees. Not surprisingly, Twitter was not going to let the Facebook relationship go unanswered. Continuing to position themselves as the real time platform, Twitter showed up with prominent on-site branding and a heavy focus on live streamed content, on the heels of their announcement of 360 live videos.
All in all, CES 2017 did not disappoint and perfectly served up the recipe of its 50 years of success. Our industry moves fast and in unexpected directions sometimes, and CES continues to be the conference where we can get together to be delightfully surprised and inspired.
Authenticity was key in the launch of Destination Canada’s latest suite of rich content. The ‘Explore Canada’ campaign is focused on bringing to life the amazing sights, wonders and experiences that Canada has to offer.
There are over 6 million European travellers considering Canada as a future holiday destination. Despite being on people’s travel list, there was no urgency to book Canada as their next holiday destination. Our goal was to change Canada from a ‘might visit at some point’ destination to a ‘must see’ and next on the list.
Destination Canada is Canada’s national tourism marketing organisation. They promote Canada’s extraordinary experiences in 11 countries around the world. Their key markets include Germany, UK, Australia and France.
Research shows that consumers are increasingly moving away from traditional media. Instead, they are turning towards more personalised and trusted sources – such as friends, family and key influencers – to research and plan their travels.
Traditional marketing campaigns with sponsored banners or branded social posts are no longer enough to convince consumers to buy a big-ticket item like an international holiday. Our content marketing approach needed to reach and entice consumers at key points along their decision-making journey. We wanted to use more novel, innovative marketing ideas to engage these travellers emotionally.
Based on this, our focus is content like videos, photos and articles. Rather than a traditional branded campaign, the idea was to have viewers come into contact with the content naturally in relevant environments they typically visit for travel planning and purchase.
Over 500 pieces of high-quality content were developed across passion points and locations in Canada. Because authenticity is integral to this strategy, we didn’t include any branding on this content.
For the video content, we are leveraging a high-profile YouTuber from each of our key markets. Each influencer uses their typical filming style to highlight Canada as the perfect vacation setting. Influencers share and promote the content directly with their YouTube followers, allowing the material to seed organically. Many also promote their Canada videos on their Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram accounts.
You can currently view the latest influencer content tailored for the UK and Germany, with France and Australia content coming soon.
We then use data to align consumers with unbranded content that caters to their individual interests, passions and travel purchase behaviours. Once viewers engage with multiple pieces of unbranded content, we then serve them a personalised message from a local tourism partner who can offer them a great deal for the location or experience they’d viewed.
We are in the second exciting year of this campaign. The tremendous success of last year’s efforts included over 50 million content views and over 190K content viewers booked a holiday to Canada, with over $231 in additional tourism revenue generated for a 67:1 ROI.
Want to keep exploring? Visit Destination Canada’s key market websites – UK, France, Germany and Australia.
OMD and Destination Canada were recently awarded two M&M Global Awards for Smart Use of Data and International Growth Strategy. Our work has also been featured on the Think with Google blog.
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.
Click this image to find out more about Dmexco.
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.
If you’re not a hard-core gamer, why would you ever venture into the deafening, frenetic chaos that is E3? The three-day electronics gaming convention held in Los Angeles each summer has a reputation for bombast and over-the-top extravaganza. As it hurdles into its twenty-first year amidst reports of sky-rocketing booth costs forcing major players to pull out of the main floor, questions have arisen around its continued relevance. Is there still a meaningful place for E3 in the wider marketing community’s landscape or is it simply a trade event for the geeks and journalists?
As I wandered through the illuminated, tech-laden halls, it seemed to me that, for now at least, E3 remains in the former camp; a destination still worthy of a visit. After all, when you’re dealing with an industry that’s valued at $99.3bn globally, that touches 1.2 bn gamers around the world, and possesses an enviable level of fan commitment and adulation (the average 13+ gamer in the US spends 6.3 hours a week playing video games), it’s critical to immerse yourself in that passion point and take learnings and inspiration from it.
E3 offers marketers a glimpse into the future. Into the future of devices, content, and consumer behaviour. E3 acts a portal into tomorrow’s living room, showing us the devices that will move from niche gaming to mass family use, the content that will move from game to film, and the likelihood of gamers embracing technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality into their gaming experience.
A tour of the showroom floor revealed four things:
1. Content reigns supreme.
This year, there was a palpable shift in emphasis from hardware to content. With Sony heralded as the winner on day one for its focus on exclusive game content, it was clear that the fans were most excited by the stories and the worlds that they will discover and the adventures that they’ll have online.
2. Devices are becoming Personal.
In a move that suggested a nod towards fashion and a response to the consumer desire for personalisation, Microsoft Xbox Design Lab announced that it’s allowing players to design and order their own Xbox One controllers. However, beyond the physical stamping of our selves onto devices, it’s the personalisation and application player data that’s really interesting.
3. VR is right around the corner.
VR gaming is a reality and whilst there was no single app held up as hero, news that Sony will launch its VR platform this October means that we’re on our way to hitting mass consumption levels. Whilst developers admitted that they’re still figuring out the implications of VR on the lone and shared gaming experience , and that they’ll need players to come on that journey with them, perhaps it is that very act of co-discovery that makes VR so revolutionary.
4. Competition heats up with the ongoing rise of eSports Leagues
Whilst the debate continues around whether eSports is a true sport or merely a competition, participation is becoming increasingly professional and high-profile, and spectatorship has become both event-based and shared. With global audiences exceeding 226mn, the opportunities to surround eSports stadiums and support players and fans is clear. Last year, Nissan leant into eSports by becoming a tournament sponsor, and this year Pepsi launched the ice-tea Brisk Mate to gamers to keep them refreshed and energized. We can expect more brands to actively explore this space and develop ways of giving fans access to the events and to the stars they’re now following in droves.
In an innovation-hungry world, it’s key that we look at how we can infuse the thinking of one sector into another. Inspiration comes from putting yourself in unfamiliar spaces and the ongoing evolution within the gaming industry cements its position as a source of inspiration and marketing activation.
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