Month: June 2018

Hello from sunny Cannes, where things heated up on Wednesday thanks to the tech companies. The day started with a fantastical storytelling experience at Facebook Beach, ended with a show-stopping performance by Travis Scott on Spotify Beach, and two tech companies broke some news in between. At a Google press breakfast, YouTube released its new…

It’s been a heck of a couple of months for Mark Read. The Wunderman CEO was promoted to co-chief operating officer of WPP in April after then-CEO Martin Sorrell stepped down amid an investigation into misuse of company funds. Read shares his role with Andrew Scott, WPP’s COO for EMEA, who focuses on the commercial… Continue reading »

The post WPP’s Mark Read Is Serious About “Getting On With The Business” appeared first on AdExchanger.

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Ratko Vidakovic, founder at AdProfs. With the digital ad market poised to continue growing by double-digit figures, Facebook and Google will, unsurprisingly, “account for 90% of that growth,” according to… Continue reading »

The post Ad Tech Abandoned The SMB Market appeared first on AdExchanger.

Mark Jenkins spent his first two weeks as the new senior director of marketing at Roy Rogers Restaurants, manning the drive-thru window, making gravy, frying chicken and prepping salads. “As a marketing guy, I need to really understand the ops platforms inside the restaurant, the experience and the way things are built,” said Jenkins, who… Continue reading »

The post Roy Rogers Restaurants Taps New Marketing Chief To Beef Up On Digital appeared first on AdExchanger.

Waldorf Astoria is using social media to connect with the young, affluent millennial women it sees as its next guests. The goal is make sure that the ritzy Hilton-owned brand, whose roots go back to the late 1800s, has a marketing strategy that hits “the sweet spot with the newer entrants to the luxury demographic,”… Continue reading »

The post Waldorf Astoria Launches First Digital-Led Branding Campaign appeared first on AdExchanger.

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Michael Tuminello, vice president of solutions and partnerships at Innovid. Believe it or not, video ad standards are almost 10 years old. VAST 2.0 and VPAID 1.0 [PDF] were drafted in 2009 and, generally… Continue reading »

The post VAST 4.1: Why Are Changes Needed? appeared first on AdExchanger.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Rumors And Rosé “Cannes is really good at rosé, heat, parties and rumors,” Brian Lesser, president of AT&T’s Advertising and Analytics group, told CNBC at the Cannes Lions Festival on Wednesday. The rumors swirling at Cannes this year center on AT&T’s reported deal for… Continue reading »

The post AT&T’s Lesser Coy On AppNexus Buy; Facebook Rakes In The Ad Revenue appeared first on AdExchanger.

As we emerge from a dark age of data scrubbing, spreadsheet sifting and rampant guesswork, let’s take a moment to look back at the world of work we left behind so we can fully appreciate our AI-augmented present.

Not too long ago (and for far too many marketers, still to this day) tedious and time-consuming tasks filled the timesheets of all but the most senior executives. But as new, affordable AI-powered tools take their place in the trenches, marketers are finally moving to man the command center, reshaping and elevating their role and potential impact.

We talked to AI-savvy marketers at the Bank of Montreal (BMO) about a few of the most profound shifts. Apologies in advance for the PTSD.
 

 
Then: A deluge of data
Will Duong, senior manager of BMO’s leads management engine and data strategy, has been with the bank for nine years – long enough to remember when customer data collection was like trying to keep grains of sand from slipping between his fingers. The fact that BMO was collecting data from scores of channels made things especially tough. Duong found himself manually collecting information from a vast array of data streams, dropping it into multiple spreadsheets and struggling to merge it all before using the insights to design campaigns.
 
Now: User-friendly insights
A process that used to take weeks or months is now instantaneous. Entering a few key inputs related to demographics or user behavior can generate detailed suggestions around who to target, at what time and on which platform. Resulting campaigns can then be deployed and coordinated in real time across channels as varied as email, web, SMS, social media or mobile apps.
 

 
“We have about 400 always-on campaigns running,” said Duong. “I don’t have a production team creating files, picking them up, manually processing them, loading them to another server and monitoring them for each campaign execution.” Instead, IBM Watson Marketing handles all the touchpoints. “We can just let it run and then optimize.”

Then: One for all
For lots of marketers, personalized targeting was something of a white whale. They did have customer data – mountains of it, actually, ranging from demographics to browsing habits and spending patterns. But parsing all of it to identify fleshed-out, specific customers required a Herculean manual effort. For many, the only realistic solution was to craft broad messaging that appealed to anyone and everyone, then blast those messages across every conceivable platform.

Now: To each their own
AI engines have stepped up to take in and synthesize data across channels and devices – customer signals, behavior, profiles, environments, contexts and other variables. Armed with a deeper understanding of their consumers, marketers can now determine their ideal targets and tailor personalized messaging that plays to customers’ interests, locations and much more.
 

 
“We’re triggering transaction-based offers in real time and in a specific context,” said Duong. “We’ve moved from traditional direct marketing channels like direct mail and telemarketing, which don’t deliver a response rate that’s worth the cost, towards real-time interaction – leveraging the moments when customers interact with us across channels and talking about what matters to them.”

Then: Isolated touchpoints
Over the years, as more platforms for engagement emerged, marketers responded by integrating new channels – one per year in the case of BMO. While this rewarded them with more customer data, each platform largely functioned as its own island. The result: Marketers knew a lot about how customers interacted with platforms in isolation, but very little about how those platforms interacted or could be sequenced.

Now: Mapping the entire path
For the first time, marketers can draw a coherent map between those islands, identifying customers’ affinities, favorite channels and online behaviors. For a company like BMO, that translates to the ability to optimize their messaging and offer strategies across each channel.

“We’ve done the work of integrating all the different channels,” said Duong. “AI enables us to optimize what we’re doing within them. Being able to stitch the journey from physical to digital channels and demonstrate benefits of each allows us to show the rest of the bank how to monetize channel engagement and data analytics.”

Then: Waiting for insights
Think about the sheer number of steps involved when segmenting customer databases: exporting gigabytes of data from multiple silos into spreadsheets; creating local copies; generating analytics; creating segments; and finally re-uploading the data. It took days before marketers were even able to compare their company’s data with industry benchmarks.

“We’d been using monthly tech models running on a certain cadence, and by the time they got to the customer, they might be 30 days stale,” said Duong. “The customer could easily, based on their spending pattern or behavior, have switched into a totally different segment.”

And on the UX side, customers were bailing at the first sign of trouble with marketers none the wiser.
 

 
Now: Real-time analysis, immediate action
Today, you can type in a simple description into an AI-powered system – “males, 28 to 34, income greater than $75K, east coast United States, who prefer high fashion” – and boom, your segment is available on-demand. This immediately usable, useful data is changing the game. “Taking in real-time intents across all the different components allows us to better target and optimize our interactions,” said Duong. “And we’ve seen a three-x lift in response rates when we tie in digital intent.”

AI can also observe where a consumer is getting snagged on poor UX, troubleshooting it in real time or alerting a human marketer to quickly take action. Those more pleasant experiences lead customers to stick around.

So there’s little doubt that AI is making marketers’ lives easier and bottom lines blacker, and these early returns are just that: We’ve only scratched the surface of the potential benefits an AI-powered industry offers. It won’t be long before everything “now” is “then” again.

The post 4 ways AI radically changed how marketers do their jobs appeared first on Digiday.

The bodega cat is a familiar figure to any New York City resident. Now, Instacart has made its own version of the feline friend for grocery delivery users.

Instacat (yes, Insta-cat) is a new browser extension for Google Chrome launching June 21 that lets desktop users see a cartoon cat jump around while they shop on Instacart. Instacart hopes the playful extension, created with agency Mischief, gives Instacart an edge over other grocery and food delivery services.

“We decided to go with Instacat because people are familiar with the neighborhood cat that often hangs out at your neighborhood convenience store, and genuinely, people love cats, so it was a playful way of connecting with people,” said Guillaume McIntyre, Instacart’s head of digital marketing.

The company is buying ads featuring Instacat on social in hopes of getting more people to the service. For now, Instacat is planned to be a temporary experience.

“Right now, the plan is that we will push the campaign for about two or three weeks, and then we’ll take a read to see how things are going, how much of an impact we’re seeing,” McIntyre said.

The extension is reminiscent of Instacart’s early growth, which was driven by word of mouth rather than a big investment in advertising. Instacart gained a formal marketing team when McIntyre joined in April of last year, and now, the majority of Instacart’s marketing dollars are spent on Facebook, Google and programmatic.

Most of Instacart’s inbound traffic comes from Google, McIntyre said. The company’s consumer research attributes that to word of mouth as well as signage in its partner stores like Costco and Safeway.

Founded in 2012, Instacart competes with tech giants like Amazon, with Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods; meal-kit delivery startups like Blue Apron and HelloFresh; and traditional grocery stores. Instacart plans to make delivery available to 90 million households within the U.S. and Canada by the end of 2018. It’s funded by more than $1 billion in venture capital from Sequoia and Andreessen.

“We’re playing in an industry that is almost a trillion-dollar industry,” McIntyre said. “There hasn’t been much innovation around grocery shopping for quite some time. Everyone knows grocery shopping is bound to go online. What people don’t know is who is going to be the long-term leader.”

The post Instacart creates ‘Instacat’ to make online shopping more like the real thing appeared first on Digiday.

For Jack Appleby, the 40-mile drive from Los Angeles to Anaheim is “convenient.” At least, he said he sees the journey as worth it for what he hopes to get out of this year’s VidCon, the digital video industry’s annual conference launched in 2010.

Appleby, the director of creative strategy at Petrol Advertising, is headed to VidCon this year for the first time. His objective: education around the growing industry of influencer marketing.

“I’m tired of the same old influencer and brand pitches from agencies,” Appleby said. “I’d rather know more about how and why the creators make what they make. It helps me build tighter plans that utilize influencers in more interesting ways.”

Influencer marketing is at a turning point. In the days ahead of VidCon, marketing executives in Cannes, France, have been calling for more transparency from influencers and the platforms that promote them, such as Instagram. For example, Unilever CMO Keith Weed said his company will not work with influencers who buy followers. Meanwhile, in Anaheim, marketers can meet and learn from 30,000 attendees, many of whom are teenage fans of influencers along with up-and-coming and established creators.

VidCon veterans said even eight years in, the four-day conference has remained a valuable place to keep up on the world of YouTube stars and other social influencers. Greg Baroth, founder of Monogram Artists, is returning for the seventh time this year.

“There’s no better place to meet digital talent than VidCon, and every major ad agency is there, brand and PR firm,” Baroth said. “Talent also gets to meet with specific platform reps there, which they may not normally have access to.”

VidCon remains a gathering of the advertisers, the platforms and the creators, quite unlike CES, Mobile World Congress and South by Southwest, which tend to leave out the actual creators as well as their fans. And while the upfronts and the NewFronts can include all of the above, VidCon is less about forming partnerships and securing substantial deals in the moment, but rather making connections that could be meaningful in the future.

While VidCon was started by YouTube stars and YouTube still takes much of the spotlight, platform attendance has grown. GoPro has been going to VidCon for the past few years, and this year for the first time, it’s hosting a booth.

VidCon is a “great way for us to show people and remind people that GoPro is more than just an action sports camera company. It’s a great life-capture device, another creative element for storytellers. We can talk young vloggers to say, ‘Hey, try this,’” said Rick Loughery, GoPro’s vp of global product communications.

VidCon has its established players and veteran attendees, but it continues to attract newcomers each year, whether that’s interested marketers like Appleby, a nascent platform, an up-and-coming creator or a new superfan. This is also the first year VidCon is running under its new parent company Viacom.

Zach Blume, co-founder and managing director at digital studio Portal A, said his team has been attending VidCon for the past six years, and they always meet first-time attendees.

“Each time, we see a wave of new faces: brands, publishers and agencies that are having their first exposure to the energy and explosiveness of our space. You can always tell by the startled look in their eyes,” Blume said. “For very different reasons, VidCon can be an equally powerful experience for both veterans and newcomers.”

The post Why marketers are heading to VidCon appeared first on Digiday.