Month: March 2019

Brewer Molson Coors wants to change customers’ relationships with beer brands by moving interactions beyond store shelves, by launching e-commerce platforms that allow products to be shipped to customers’ homes directly.

The company last week opened an e-commerce site for Blue Moon, and in February, it rolled out a similar site for Miller Lite. Because there are restrictions around selling beer online, checkout, delivery and pickup are powered by third-party marketplaces Drizly and Minibar Delivery.

The sites are both a data and a brand visibility play, as Molson Coors looks to get a window into customers’ browsing behavior. Molson Coors has landing pages for some of its brands, but Blue Moon and Miller Light are the first to be purchase-enabled. The company hopes to monetize its brand websites and ads through shoppable features. The e-commerce sites will also help the brand learn more about customers, insight it can use for marketing and product development.

“A direct-to-consumer website allows us far deeper insights around clickstream data, consumer behavior, how they operate and where they live,” said Trey Harshfield, Molson Coors’ global director of e-commerce. “It’s effectively solving another problem of driving awareness around buying beer.”

For alcohol brands, regulations around direct e-commerce are a major hurdle that hinders digital customer relationships. Brands must comply with the three-tier system of alcohol distribution, which hinders a direct relationship between the consumer and the brand: Manufacturers provide products to wholesalers, who distribute the products to retailers, who, in turn, sell to consumers. No one player can be involved in more than one tier. As a result, the lion’s share of beer purchases occurs inside stores. According to Molson Coors, 1% of beer purchases takes place online, while 80% of consumers aren’t aware beer can be purchased online. But thanks to the rise of e-commerce alcohol marketplace platforms like Drizly and Minibar Delivery, brands like Molson Coors can find a route to reach customers directly.

“[Beer] brand sites weren’t really designed to sell beer anyway, so these click-through destinations were previously kind of dead-ends that we weren’t monetizing,” Harshfield said. And while driving sales is an indirect objective, the more immediate gain for Molson Coors is a richer profile of customer behavior to determine the best ways to market to them, he added.

By working with e-commerce marketplaces, alcohol brands can receive data from two sources: information on browsing behavior gathered through their e-commerce sites (including preferences, purchase patterns, time of day and attribution), and additional customer insights based on their behavior after they click the purchase button, from the marketplaces. Minibar Delivery, a marketplace partner of Molson Coors that works with more than 400 brand partners, would not comment on data-sharing arrangements it has with Molson Coors. But co-founder Lara Crystal said its platform offers brands anonymized data based on purchase behavior.

“For years, there’s been a lack of transparency — a lot of alcohol advertising has been out of home, on television,” she said. “They haven’t had the benefits a lot of other industries have had, in terms of that data analysis to understand who are their customers, what are they buying, where are they buying, how the competition is affecting them and how does pricing matter.”

Molson Coors said it plans to embed the shoppable capability into its social media ads on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and display media. Though he didn’t provide a specific time frame, Harshfield said the goal is to build an e-commerce portfolio site that acts as a focal point for customers looking for delivery and pickup options for all of its brands.

Molson Coors isn’t alone among beer brands looking to drive sales and collect customer information online. Heineken, which also owns Tecate, Dos Equis, Strongbow, Red Stripe and Newcastle, among other beer brands, first launched an e-commerce platform in the U.S. in 2017. Molson Coors has also been selling non-alcoholic beer on Amazon for a year, and its kombucha brand Clearly Kombucha is also available on Amazon’s U.S. marketplace.

Jake Matthews, research director at Gartner L2 who focuses on CPG brands, said time will tell if Molson Coors’ move into e-commerce will drive sales, but at the moment, it’s an opportunity to acquire more first-party data and insights that could inform product development. It can also be seen as a defensive move if bigger marketplaces like Amazon decide to broaden their focus to alcohol products.

“As [Amazon] continues to expand their physical presence, there’s a possibility that it gives them more opportunities to address barriers to delivering and fulfilling online — it’s always a threat,” he said. “It’s something that Molson Coors is likely thinking about and developing a competitive moat around.”

The post Even Molson Coors is hatching a direct-to-consumer strategy appeared first on Digiday.

Diageo’s Baileys is looking to move away from its image as a staid brand and is taking its cues from food-focused publishers like Twisted with a focus on more concise social media ads.

The liqueur brand is 18 months into a revamp that has seen shorter video ads and smaller campaigns on Instagram and Facebook become focal points for how it goes to market across Europe. But rather solely focus on cocktail recipe videos and lifestyle posts like other alcohol brands on social network, Baileys efforts also cover treats. Now, the ads have more in common with snappy, simple food videos produced by the likes of BuzzFeed’s Tasty.

Diageo’s reasoning is simple: Smaller ads means more content from the same budgets, which is key for a brand like Baileys that’s trying to convince people to drink it throughout the year rather than only at Christmas. Creating big tentpole ads throughout the year to ram that point home would be too expensive. The alternative, which relies on limited media spend, has been able to get the brand in front of hundreds of thousands of people at speed when it works. Last October, it got 400,000 views in the first 20 hours of a recipe video of Baileys flavored vegan trifle that was shot, edited and posted to YouTube on the same day as a vegan-themed episode of “The Great British Bake Off.”

Alongside publishers, Baileys is also working with a group of influencers including high-profile bartenders to develop the shorter posts. And like other CPG advertisers such as Unilever and Kellogg’s, Baileys is exploring alternative ways to reward influencers when they hit goals that aren’t solely tied to reach.

“We don’t need much longer than 10 to 20 seconds to get our message across,” said Anne Nosko, Baileys marketing director for Europe.

Partnerships with food-focused publishers Jungle Creations and Tastemade have helped Notto’s team learn the secrets to cooking up addictive videos that people watch and share. Even if someone viewing those posts won’t want to drink Baileys while scrolling through a feed, it’s hard to resist the appetizing food videos on social media, said Nosko.

The number of posts produced varies, said Nosko, who said the number varies depending on the time of year and the partnerships that have been brokered.

“The plan is to keep testing out different recipes and ways we can produce the content, whether that’s recipe videos or static images of Baileys as an accompaniment to a treat,” said Nosko. “There’s more work we can do in terms of A/B testing the type of content people are expecting to see in their feeds at different times of the day.”

The changes come as Baileys puts more emphasis on blending into culture, whether that’s internet, food or literature. Consequently, there’s more emphasis on owning more first-party data to understand the right cultural moments to riff on, which is part of the reason why Baileys is running more events. Visitors to the Baileys Treat Bar last Christmas were able to share their email information with the brand in exchange for hearing more about special offers, news and future events. Diageo hired its first head of experience last year to help build events that could offer something experiential for fans as well as act as a form of data capture for the business.

“We have a substantial amount of first-party data and are just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we can do with it,” said Nosko. “Yes, that data is being fed into a data management platform, and we’re also buying programmatic ads against it too, but that’s just the beginning of what we want to do with it.”

Image courtesy of Diageo. 

The post Diageo’s Baileys focuses on shorter, smaller social media ads appeared first on Digiday.

A Washington, D.C.,-based startup is selling ad inventory inside ride-share cars.

Octopus places screens inside vehicles for Uber and Lyft to let riders decide if they want to play a game to win cash, which also means watching a 15- or 30-second ad. The startup, which launched in 2018, isn’t the first of its kind, but it’s been able to impress some brands like Red Bull and agencies like Omnicom.

“We jumped on it right away. We do a lot of Taxi TV, and with the growth of Uber and Lyft in the market and the fact it’s reaching a younger millennial audience with disposable income and with the engagement option, it made sense for us,” said Hailey Barton, digital media director at Omnicom’s Serino Coyne.

Octopus’ current audience is about 2 million unique passengers per month, said Octopus co-founder and CEO Cherian Thomas. The passenger demographics are 32 years old, 48% female and 52% male with a Bachelor’s degree or higher, on average, per the pitch deck reviewed by Digiday.

“The average ride share is very different than a bus stop, very different than who’s in a taxi. It’s important to know that this is high disposable income and are early adopters to technology,” Thomas said.

But beyond generalization of who rides in an Uber, Octopus also touts being able to know that at least an actual person is viewing the ad. It has sensors in the tablet that verified a person is there. Thomas said the system does not take or store photos and is GDPR compliant.

“They’re not charging you if someone were to put an umbrella in the seat. It has to be an actual person. In the digital space, you feel like you’re getting your impressions,” Barton said.

Octopus charges on cost per impressions, where CPMs range from $15 to $30, depending on the extent of the deal. For example, buyers can purchase 100% share of voice for a particular area of the city and choose specific cities.

Serino Coyne signed a contract with Octopus to run ads for the rest of the year. Barton said they did not take from their budget dedicated to Taxi TV but rather is pulling from the digital budget.

“It’s debatable what [Octopus] is. Is it outdoor or broadcast? Because it’s interactive, we bucketed it there in video,” Barton said.

Octopus is live in DC, Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Austin and Houston, and will be expanding to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Las Vegas, Miami, Atlanta and Dallas this year, per the pitch deck.

Thomas said one of his biggest challenges is balancing growth with available ad inventory. Octopus is shipping about 1,000 to 2,000 tablets every month to new drivers. Currently, the system only sells ads via direct deals but plans to expand to programmatic this year.

“I just added 20 million video impressions in the ecosystem. We’re going to continue I/O, but we’re also connecting with programmatic so Trade Desk can use us. Advertisers won’t get interactive units with that, but they’ll get video plays,” Thomas said.

The post A startup is putting ads inside Ubers and Lyfts appeared first on Digiday.

Bryan Wiener and Sarah Hofstetter have resigned as CEO and president, respectively, of media and marketing research firm Comscore. Their resignations come less than a year after the 360i cofounders
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