Month: September 2018

TV network Starz is seeing better results from Facebook Stories than News Feed.

Alison Hoffman, CMO of Starz, said the network has been seeing two times better video-completion rates within Facebook Stories than in the Facebook News Feed. Hoffman would not reveal the average video-completion rates of each channel.

Hoffman said Stories ads are also generating lower cost-per-subscriber rates than ads in News Feed. She said the Starz looked at people who downloaded the Starz app and became subscribers after viewing ads in Stories and then compared those results to what it was seeing from the same ads running in News Feed. Hoffman would not reveal how much the network was saving on each subscriber but said it was “more significant than a dollar or two.”

“It’s early days, but we’ve been comparing News Feed to Stories, just to get a sense of how they’re preforming,” said Hoffman. “People are sticking with it and paying attention, so there’s reason to spend a little more time and focus in Stories.”

Starz first began testing ads in Facebook Stories in September to tease the season-five finale of the network’s show “Power.” A 15-second ad showed scenes from the show’s season finale before calling on viewers to download the Starz app with the first seven days for free. The ad ran for two weeks with the goal to drive app downloads, Hoffman said. Starz also ran a similar ad in Stories as part of an early awareness campaign for the fourth season of the network’s show “Outlander.”

Besides the two ad campaigns, Starz has been testing Stories as a format for organic engagement without paid support on a weekly basis. One goal with Stories is to get existing fan bases of other shows to tune into new ones, Hoffman said. To promote a new documentary series Starz launched in June called “Wrong Man,” it pulled scenes from “Power” and “Outlander” and used the polling feature in Stories to ask questions about each show.

Hoffman would not say how much Starz has spent so far on ads in Stories but intends to continue to test the format. Still, one thing Stories lacks from the News Feed, Hoffman said, is scale. “Looking at the raw numbers, it’s promising, but how is it going to scale?”

Facebook is pushing ads in Facebook Stories as a placement option that complements Messenger, Instagram Stories and News Feed. Advertisers don’t have the option to only run ads in Stories; they have to be part of a larger campaign running across News Feed or Instagram Stories. Facebook also announced on Wednesday that it will be bringing Stories ads into Messenger and now 300 million people use both Facebook Stories and Messenger every day. Facebook previously announced Stories had 150 million users last May and Messenger had 70 million as of last September.

“When marketers use more of our placements, the performance is better overall,” said Maria Smith, director of product at Facebook, at a press event on Wednesday.

Companies like KFC, Kettle, iHeartRadio, Allstate, Chevrolet, Norwegian Airlines have also tested ads in Facebook Stories over the past couple of months. Like Starz, companies are seeing lower KPIs from the format. At the press event, Facebook shared stats from a KFC UK campaign that ran across Facebook and Instagram Stories and generated a 33 percent lower CPV and 19 percent lower CPMs because the ads ran across both channels, according to Facebook.

The post Starz sees two times the video-completion rates in Facebook Stories than in News Feed appeared first on Digiday.

Amazon’s new 4-star store, where customer feedback determines what’s on the shelves isn’t just a way for Amazon to appeal more to sellers — it’s also a look at how Amazon is shaping how the department store of the future looks like.

For one, it’s a new take on a traditional model where buyers decide on inventory, not customers, which means added pressure on big-box retailers to curate selections based on customer feedback rather than market research alone or raw assumptions.

It’s also a shot across the bow for the off-price retail model, which is based on selling goods for cheap because they didn’t sell well the first time.

“It’s the absolute best use of data we’ve seen so far,” said Jim Cusson, president of retail marketing agency Theory House. “Any retailer’s biggest concern is inventory carrying cost. If you can curate a store with guaranteed success of items on the shelves, you have a significant advantage.”

Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.

According to a recent report from consultancy IHL, retailers tie up significant amounts of capital anticipating customer purchase behavior by holding safety stock in the event some items beat expectations. IHL estimates that retailers in North America collectively tie up $24 billion in safety stock to compensate for poor inventory management. Items that don’t sell are often sent to discount retailers to offset some of the cost, but if retailers could more effectively predict how products will do at the outset based on customer data, discount retailers stand to lose.

“There’s a whole retail industry like TJ Maxx and Marshalls and other discount providers that make a living selling products major retail brands couldn’t sell or weren’t hot sellers,” said Cusson. “If Amazon can open its doors, and there’s a high likelihood the products will resonate with consumers, that’s a key advantage — they’ve got the most data.”

Cusson added that whether the challenge to off-price retailers becomes an actual threat depends on how quickly the concept of user-feedback driven merchandising scales, and how other industry players respond to Amazon’s move. In addition, as recent TJ Maxx growth plans demonstrate, some customers are drawn to a “treasure hunt” experience of finding a bargain after rifling through merchandise.

At Amazon’s 4-Star store, all products offered are rated at least four stars online, are “new and trending” or top sellers. Product categories include consumer electronics, kitchen, home, toys, books, and games; the store also features curated selections, including those most often added to online wish lists, products that are trending in New York, items that are frequently bought together, and “Amazon Exclusives.”

While 4-Star is an experiment in data-driven inventory, Amazon isn’t the only brand bringing customer data to inventory decisions. Stitch Fix, for example, has been using customer data to personalize product offerings to customers. EMarketer e-commerce and retail analyst Andrew Lipsman said Amazon’s 4-Star store will likely push traditional retailers to invest more in using customer data to inform merchandising decisions.

Customer data-driven merchandising also doesn’t push out retail buyers, though their roles may change, he added.

“There’s nothing that says they couldn’t do something similar — if you think about large retailers, they have their own data from online and physical stores, and they could incorporate product reviews an ratings,” he said.

 

Image via Amazon

The post Amazon’s 4-star store shows what the future of multibrand retail could look like appeared first on Digiday.

A year after 8,000 retail stores were closed as part of the so-called “retail apocalypse,” retailers are responding by revamping their stores. Seventy-one percent of retailers surveyed at the Digiday Retail Forum last month say their companies are investing in modernizing their physical retail stores.

Physical retail is experiencing a comeback, in part because companies are rethinking the role of a store as part of a holistic strategy.

The post Digiday Research: 71 percent of retailers are investing in physical store upgrades appeared first on Digiday.

Securities regulators sued Elon Musk for fraud and sought to remove him from Tesla Inc., raising doubts about the future of an electric-car maker synonymous with the audacious entrepreneur.

Breast pumping is often a cumbersome task for women, particularly since many pumps on the market are contraptions complete with tubes and cords that require elaborate (not to mention time-consuming) setups and private spaces. In recent years, a few tech companies have tried to remedy this the advent of wearable breast pumps that essentially let…

It has been instructive to watch Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony — while also listening to the conversations of people in the advertising business.

Google turned 20 years old this month, and the first Google Doodle appeared on this day in 1998. Since its early days as a project at Stanford University–named Backrub–to rank webpages based on their authority, it has morphed several times over to become arguably the most important media–or technology–outfit in the world. Adweek recently caught…

There have been 95 million Pinterest searches related to Halloween over the past year, up 51 percent year-over-year, and Pinterest shared some of the top trending topics so that brands can get a jump on spooky season. In the makeup and beauty category, face paint is drawing a good deal of search attention, with searches…

When was the last time you had a dining experience so immersive that you felt as if you had been transported to an entirely different reality–or had merely left reality altogether? While that may sound like an intense sojourn for the quick bite to eat, there is a cafe in Seoul, South Korea that proves…

Facebook unveiled some new options for video ad campaigns on its platform. The social network said in a blog post that over 70 percent of its in-stream ads are viewed to completion, most with audio enabled. Those ads are delivered as mid-roll for News Feed videos and as either pre-roll or mid-roll elsewhere on the…