Month: April 2019

Already contentious with Facebook and wary of Apple, news video publishers now have a new platform relationship to evaluate in Amazon.

Amazon is developing an ad-supported, free video streaming app focused on news, according to a report from The Information last week. The app, which will be made for Fire TV devices, will feature a mix of live and on-demand news video programming. Amazon is targeting a launch date in mid-May, though the rollout could be delayed into the summer, according to multiple sources familiar with the company’s plans. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

The post ‘It’s a negotiation’: Video publishers debate distribution on Amazon’s upcoming Fire TV news app appeared first on Digiday.

Reebok is angling for a deeper relationship with its customers through a tiered loyalty program that offers free shipping and returns, VIP customer service, events, training sessions and other personalized offers.

On Tuesday, the company launched Unlocked, a new tiered member program that quietly rolled out on Reebok’s site last month. For Reebok, it’s a competitive move against newer brands that have had a head start on loyalty programs like Lululemon or Under Armour. It’s an effort to grow sales, build customer relationships, and get additional feedback as it evolves its product selection.

“Unlocked is fundamentally a value-based program; it rewards our consumers for interacting with our brand,” said Matt Blonder, Reebok’s global head of digital. “There are points associated with dollars spent, but there are also points associated with social interaction, with account creation and enrichment, event interaction, et cetera.”

Customers can sign up for the program by creating a profile on Reebok’s site. They can gain points by buying products, but customers also have opportunities to build reward points balances just by interacting with the brand, including reviewing products, posting to social media platforms about their experiences with products on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, and going to events. In return, customers get benefits like free shipping and returns, training sessions, early access to products, invites to exclusive events, and personalized customer service. Through experience-based rewards, Reebok is encouraging customers to offer more information on their preferences, so it can tailor rewards and offers to members’ needs. A separate loyalty rewards system called ReebokOne is also being rolled out for Reebok-certified fitness professionals.

The profiles the company wants to build are an effort to acquire more customer data to personalize loyalty offers and get feedback to inform future product releases. It’s a completely in-house effort, Blonder said, the result of a 30% digital staff increase over the course of the past year.

Reebok’s global revenue for 2018 was $1.8 billion, a small component of parent company Adidas’ $24.5 billion global revenue. Adidas has been working to lift sales for Reebok, whose third-quarter sales dropped 5%, with revenues dropping by 1%. Adidas CEO Kasper Rorsted said in an earnings call in November that the company is prioritizing profitability and “getting the brand attractiveness up to a level which is acceptable.” By building a loyalty program, Reebok is tapping into consumer trends around wellness.

The company is partnering with other companies to deliver rewards, including Well+Good, Follain, Exhale, ProBar, Tula, Country Archer and Les Mills. The personalized, experienced-based rewards are tools Reebok is using to help encourage customers to populate their customer profiles, tag the brand in social-media posts and write product reviews.

“It helps us to tailor the information that we share, to tailor products and product recommendation,” Blonder said. “It also helps to inform our entire product creation, design life cycle, as well as how we come to market.”

Using customers as influencers is a powerful way to drive conversion, Blonder said, and it’s an extension of an influencer marketing strategy it’s been using for a few years.

The company will also launch a revamped website later this month that loads faster and whose back end offers improved data analytics capabilities. Pairing the loyalty program launch with a revamped website is a good strategic move, argued Gartner senior specialist Ben Feldman.

“Typically, when brands launch a loyalty program, they have to layer new features onto an existing site infrastructure,” he said. “Reebok’s ability to integrate loyalty with the online shopping experience in one fell swoop is a big advantage.”

And by building in personalized lifestyle rewards instead of discount coupons that have traditionally accompanied loyalty programs, customers have added incentives to share data. But for legacy brands like Reebok, it’s still a game of catch-up with online-first brands that already have rich customer data repositories.

“They’re likely starting with a data deficit,” said T3 president Ben Gaddis. “Those other [online-first] companies are probably years ahead — Reebok is going to have to figure out how to take that to the next level and win back some of those customers.”

The post Reebok is launching a new membership program to build direct customer relationships appeared first on Digiday.

After investing in a handful of startups over the past year, Foot Locker is launching a new incubator program to build relationships with emerging brands earlier on than it has in the past.

At its investor day last week, Foot Locker’s chief marketing officer Jed Berger announced that the company is launching a new incubator program called Greenhouse. Greenhouse will consist of different programs, which the brand is calling “franchises,” with the goal being to “cultivate new brands and relationships with new vendors,” according to Berger.

Details on the program so far are slim (Foot Locker did not respond to a request for comment) but Berger highlighted nine different programs at Foot Locker’s investor day that will live under the Greenhouse umbrella. They are all either meant to give Foot Locker a stronger foothold in building stronger relationships with designers in footwear, which has traditionally been its bread and butter, or in product categories or markets that it’s recently started to see stronger sales in, like women’s apparel.

Project 366 will pair an experienced designer with an up-and-comer to launch their own brand. Title will partner designers and athletes to create new women’s sportswear brands. Not all of the programs will result in new products — another program under the Greenhouse umbrella will be Sounds, a project to discover new musicians; another, called Tokyo Showroom, will consist of Foot Locker working with a Japanese company to help introduce Japanese brands to the U.S. market.

It’s part of an all-around reinvention for Foot Locker, which has historically made most of its revenue by selling products from big, established brands. Nearly 70% of its product sold in the last year came from Nike, for example. But Foot Locker is betting that by building closer relationships with emerging brands, it can spot consumer trends earlier. Many of its competitors, like Dick’s Sporting Goods, are also trying to reinvent themselves as they find that wholesale doesn’t cut it anymore. Dick’s, for example, is starting to strengthen its private label assortment.

“What we see now is Foot Locker getting involved in product development right at the beginning,” Matt Powell, a sports industry analyst for NPD Group said. “It may not sound like much, but it is a sea change from how business has traditionally been done in the sneaker world.”

Foot Locker’s push into product development can be partially explained by a rough patch in 2017 — during the second quarter of 2017, Nike experienced a downturn in popularity, and as a result, Foot Locker’s sales also took a dip. That was the impetus, as Foot Locker CEO Richard Johnson said during a call with investors last month, to start turning around inventory more quickly, and to start investing in startups that could help them spot consumer trends more quickly.

Over the past year and a half, Foot Locker has invested nearly $143 million in startups, including sneaker reseller platform GOAT, children’s apparel company Rockets of Awesome, children’s footwear brand Super Heroic, women’s apparel brand Carbon 38, and Pensole Footwear Design Academy, which trains up-and-coming sneaker designers. But Foot Locker invested in most of these brands by the time they had some traction and had been on the market for several years. Greenhouse will be a program to help build new brands — and will presumably help Foot Locker get a greater stake in these brands earlier on.

In order to test the viability of these new brands, Berger said during the investor day that Greenhouse will also have its own, standalone shopping app to launch later this year. Greenhouse will feature one brand a week. Berger said that some of the brands featured on Greenhouse may “eventually be incorporated into the broader Foot Locker ecosystem,” while some will just be sold on the Greenhouse app.

Christopher Svezia, a footwear analyst with Wedbush Securities, said that the Greenhouse program may help Foot Locker curate a more localized product selection for new stores. The company told investors it plans to launch more than 200 of its newly designed “power stores,” through 2020. Unlike the bulk of Foot Locker’s current stores, power stores won’t be located in malls. They’re meant to not just push product, but also serve as a community events space, as Foot Locker tries to position itself as the hub of “sneaker culture.” Foot Locker could use Greenhouse to discover local artists or designers whose products they could feature in its new stores.

“This gives them access to unique product — at the end of the day, this is about offering the customer offering something they didn’t even know they wanted,” Svezia said.

The post Foot Locker is launching a new incubator program to build brands appeared first on Digiday.

Comscore recruited a duo of veteran marketers to lead its push for cross-platform measurement about a year ago.

But both leaders, CEO Bryan Wiener and president Sarah Hofstetter jointly resigned over the weekend, following a disagreement with the board on the company’s direction.

While Wiener painted a vision for a multichannel measurement company and wanted to invest more in product development, board members were largely risk-averse and pushed for ways to slim down the business, said a source familiar with the matter. This tension had existed for months, this source told Digiday.

“The board was a mismatch with this CEO. One has to give. [Wiener] realized, and I think did the right thing. If you’re not on board [with this plan,] hire someone else,” the source said.

The tension was teased by Wiener himself in his LinkedIn post. “I ultimately chose to leave as the Board and I had irreconcilable differences over how to execute the company’s strategy,” Wiener wrote.

Wiener and Hofstetter declined to comment. A Comscore spokesperson confirmed the disagreement.

“Although the Board and Bryan are generally aligned on the company’s strategy, Bryan disagreed with the company regarding the execution of the strategy. We thank Bryan for his contributions over the past year and wish him well in his future endeavors. Sarah Hofstetter, president, has also resigned from the company. The company has no immediate plans to fill her position,” a Comscore spokesperson emailed.

Wiener and Hofstetter, who both worked together at 360i, are heralded as thoughtful and impactful leaders. Five executives who have worked with Wiener and Hofstetter in previous jobs or who have partnered with them told Digiday they were impressed by the work they had done at Comscore and, therefore, shocked by the news of their departures. Comscore’s stock was down by more than 20% in Monday’s trading.

“I was completely surprised by the news. We’ve been working very hard with Comscore, and the people at Comscore have been bending over backward for us. We were finding some things that were promising there. They still had a way to go, but there was some direction,” said a media executive whose company works with Comscore.

Comscore had a refined focus thanks to Wiener and Hofstetter’s leadership, this executive said. Comscore had been pushing for cross-platform measurement and started with a new tool called Campaign Ratings.

“Comscore had always been all over the place in terms of their efforts so there was a lot of clarity to get this one thing to work. They seemed to have a plan that they were emphasizing, that they understood the need to simplify things and moved faster,” the executive said.

Indeed, a slide from Comscore’s Jan. 25 investor presentation showed how the company moved from having 18 solutions defined with acronyms to four divisions.

Comscore “had a ton of little products. I didn’t know what they all did. It had been incredibly confusing. They knew what they should be working on and seemed disciplined on going after that,” said the media executive.

Over the years, Comscore’s reputation in the industry has been affected by monetary losses, confusing acronyms and its much-larger competitor Nielsen. The hiring of Wiener and then Hofstetter helped boost Comscore’s credibility.

“Their communication was, you can believe in us again. We’re going to make smart decisions. They were bringing back that integrity and making decisions that they felt were in the best interest of their clients, employees and the industry at large,” said an industry executive who had previously worked at 360i.

Going forward, two partners said they were concerned about Comscore’s future direction. On April 1, to respond to the executive changes, the company emailed partners saying, “They did not expect to make any changes and remain focused on providing excellent service and support,” according to an executive who received the email.

A Comscore spokesperson emailed Digiday, “We do not expect these changes to impact the work that we’re doing for our clients or our strategy to be the trusted currency for planning, transacting, and evaluating media across platforms. We continue to be uniquely positioned to become the modern currency for the cross-platform era, and the changes we’ve made today are directly in line with that vision.”

Chris Apostle, iCrossing’s chief media officer, said he was still confident in Comscore’s value to the industry as a way to plan, buy and evaluate media across channels.

“While Wiener and Hofstetter played a solid role of late in helping to define how Comscore evolves going forward, we believe that the organization will still be fully capable of bringing an expanded cross-channel value to the market,” Apostle emailed.

But the media executive added, “If they were continuing to go in the same direction they had been, then this wouldn’t have happened.”

And as shocking as it was for Comscore to lose two well-regarded industry executives, the fact that Wiener and Hofstetter left together wasn’t surprising.

“Keep your friends close and your old bosses closer. Yeah, I wasn’t surprised to see her join him. They work ridiculously well together. They’re just the epitome of folks who see things through, so seeing it deteriorate that quickly is pretty shocking,” said a marketing executive familiar with the duo.

The post ‘They were bringing back that integrity’: Comscore’s leadership shakeup concerns media partners appeared first on Digiday.

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The post Publicis Considers A Bid For Epsilon As Agencies Seek Ownership Of Data appeared first on AdExchanger.

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