Month: May 2018

Adidas streetwear brand Adidas Originals has made no secret of its bid to have more influence over a bloated customer experience. It will close stores, revise retail partnerships and push further into e-commerce in order to control how more of its products are marketed and sold.

The change has meant retail and digital marketers from its global brand marketing team were merged into one unit earlier this year. It was the start of a realization that while Adidas Originals might have fewer retail platforms, those limited experiences could be better for shoppers.

An app for the Adidas’ sub brand is being considered. Adidas launched its main shopping app last November and since then has taken it to eight countries, with more than 1.5 million downloads, according to its latest earnings report. People are more likely to purchase on the app than they are the site, according to the early feedback, which has led to Adidas Originals’ marketers wondering whether the clothing line needs its own version.

There’s an “opportunity for the Originals brands to have its own app because it gives us an opportunity to speak to a very particular audience but is also part of our ecosystem,“ said Swave Szymczyk, global director of digital and retail marketing at Adidas Originals. “Since bringing retail and digital together we’re really looking at customer acquisition in the stores.”

QR codes are being used by the Adidas Originals team to shake-up sneaker drops. Codes are sent to key influencers inside sneaker boxes that can then be shared with followers who use the code to watch the influencers unbox limited edition shoes.

“We do invest in a lot of research and panels, but we’re also doing more to stay closer to genuine influencers who have networks and understand what’s happening across the market,” said Szymczyk.

It’s a change of pace for the streetwear brand, which has previously tried to be across as many innovations in the space as it can. It left Adidas Originals with a global brand team of specialists in PR, social, online commerce and traditional retail, but without a unified goal behind certain innovations at times, said Szymczyk.

“We know we’re never going to be the cheapest [seller of Adidas products,” said Szymczyk. “There will always be someone who will discount the apparel and that’s fine because its not where we want to win. We want to win on the experience….but we’re not super advanced in the space yet and so we’re having to pick out the really important parts of the customer journey to focus on because we can’t fix everything that’s broken.”

The post Adidas Originals is taking a less-is-more approach to digital appeared first on Digiday.

Adobe released a new analytics tool for paid search that helps its customers stop thinking about vanity metrics and stressing over Excel spreadsheets and simply focus on their ROI.

Called Advertising Analytics for Paid Search, Adobe’s new feature integrates with Google AdWords, Yahoo Gemini and Bing Ads to better visualize attributions for search campaigns. The tool shows impressions, clicks and cost as well as average position and quality score. For Adobe’s customers, the tool helps them monitor campaigns across search platforms rather than just see each platform’s reports and do the calculations themselves.

“Paid search is easy to measure in a silo, but it’s difficult to understand how that impacts loyalty, retention and customer value. We’re now getting customers across that bridge,” said Nate Smith, group manager of product marketing for Adobe Analytics Cloud.

Adobe’s vision is to connect pre-click data with post-click actions. Companies can track ad impressions and click activity across Google, Yahoo and Bing and then see how those translate to cart additions and completed purchases. 

Holland America Line, a subsidiary of Carnival, has been using Adobe Analytics for the last 18 months.

“My first impressions are: It’s about freaking time. Adobe has done a lot in data in the web analytics world, but when you present results of marketing campaigns, the very next question is, ‘That’s great, but how much did you spend to accomplish that?’” said Aaron Fossum, director of digital analytics at Holland America Line.

Fossum said Adobe’s update will help the cruise line better understand if branded keywords and non-branded keywords have a different advertising cost per booking.

Adobe’s tools can answer “what’s our return on ad spend? It’s something we currently have for display media, so we’ve been eager to get it for paid search,” Fossum said.

The tool can help advertisers better understand and participate in more steps of the customer journey. For example, Holland America Line could segment their users based on keyword and see how they are behaving on the company’s site beyond just purchasing a cruise.

“We can make an optimization saying we’re spending a lot of money on this keyword because people are clicking on it, but we might be landing them on a page and they’re just bouncing around,” Fossum said. 

Despite the dominance of display ads and the rise of video ads, paid search remains a significant chunk of digital ad spending. Search ad spending is estimated to be 42.7 percent of digital ad spending in 2018, according to eMarketer data.

So far, Adobe tool is connected to Google, Yahoo and Bing. The company plans to integrate more search engines in the future such as big advertising players overseas in markets like China, Smith said.

The post Adobe is pushing into search analytics appeared first on Digiday.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will meet with French President Emmanuel Macron and other European officials next week, as the Silicon Valley giant tries to calm tension with regulators and policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Executives at Walt Disney have discussed bringing animation guru John Lasseter back to the company in a new role that would reduce his managerial power but allow him to retain creative influence.

Jack Dorsey thinks the internet should have its own currency. According to the CEO of Twitter and Square, a digital currency that’s universal in nature could benefit both consumers and companies in the ever-evolving world of online payments. “The internet deserves its own currency,” Dorsey said today at the Consensus blockchain and cryptocurrency conference New…

Facebook looked to jump-start the automotive industry last November when it introduced dynamic ads and lead ads for auto, and Wednesday, the social network combined the two. In a Facebook Business post, the social network announced the availability of dynamic ads for lead generation, which enable auto dealers to combine their vehicle catalogs with lead-generation…

TBWAChiatDay New York worked with Thomson Reuters Foundation on a campaign utilizing the popularity of “unboxing” videos to educate viewers about the reality of an issue they probably associate with the long-distant past: slavery. The agency worked with Jacques Slade, a YouTube influencer whose sneaker videos regularly generate over 1.5 million views, on a video…

Navigating the world became a whole lot easier 13 years ago, when Google launched Google Maps. Within two years, Google started to make Google Maps a social experience by allowing users to post reviews of local businesses. Not only could users find businesses on Google Maps, but they could also leave public ratings and reviews….

Overture, an organization that brings together companies to advocate for global humanitarian issues, and Vice Media announced a new partnership to create a series of videos spotlighting companies that are pursuing healthier products or products that are better for the environment. Vice Media will create and distribute the videos after Overture identifies the companies making…

Meredith Xcelerated Marketing (MXM), the New York-based digital agency that was acquired by Accenture Interactive this March, welcomed former Publicis executive Bill Hughes as creative operations director. In the position, Hughes will be responsible for all aspects of the agency’s creative operations, including talent acquisition, management and retention, while reporting to CCO Roald van Wyk…