Month: June 2019

In response, consumers wrestling with information overload are seeking help to sort the signal from the noise — and the big platforms are paying attention. One of the best examples of this is the Promotions tab within Gmail, but that was just the beginning.

In order to be heard, marketers need to listen for revealed preferences while also respecting explicit user opt-ins. Best practices like thoughtful targeting, personalization and continuous testing improve performance in all channels. But for email, the most mature engagement channel, sophisticated best practices anchored in data are now table stakes. Bulk messages, unpersonalized newsletters and siloed email strategies aren’t just less effective — those messages are increasingly being sorted away from your customers’ eyes entirely.

At Braze, we commissioned a study from Forrester Consulting on consumer perception of brand humanity and learned that people are far more likely to engage with, purchase from and be loyal to more “human” brands. In practice, brand humanity is expressed through messaging — including email — that feels natural, considerate and personal. The good news? That means your teams have uniquely human superpowers to deploy — their empathy, insight, and creativity. A more mature technology ecosystem can play a strong role too, with machine-learning capabilities to enable continuous optimization of messaging based on real-time customer response.

Data democratization and the power of interdisciplinary teams
When we look into the Braze client base, we’ve found that our most sophisticated customers are running multiple tests simultaneously, analyzing results and iterating on dozens of variables every week. While as an industry we conceptually understand the importance of testing and iterating, it appears to be less common in practice. We polled listeners during a recent webinar presentation and found that nearly half the respondents (45 percent) were only running between one and three email test campaigns a week.

Organizations that prioritize learning through continuous testing see improved customer engagement and greater ROI as they optimize to beat their past results. This virtuous cycle, aided by a well-architected tech ecosystem, deepens teams’ understanding of user behavior, enabling them to produce brilliant user experiences — which then translate to stronger customer engagement throughout the lifecycle.

However, all of that can’t happen when channel teams operate in a vacuum. If your email strategy is still running in an isolated silo, you are limiting ROI and the impact of your campaigns, and run the risk of eroding brand equity by sticking your foot firmly in your mouth. Build a more complete picture of your customer by drawing insights from all channel data to inform strategy, then tactically deploy channels according to their strengths and proven customer preferences. The most effective strategies use multiple channels: Braze customer data demonstrates that while deploying an email after a user’s first session bumps engagement by 45 percent, sending an in-app message in addition to the email boosts first-time users’ engagement by a remarkable 315 percent.

Structuring teams for innovation
While your results may vary, an interdisciplinary, cross-channel approach to messaging, including email, will make it easier for people to collaborate and bring new ideas to life faster. Share the testing roadmap and, most importantly, performance data so it can better inform new creative. When you pull everyone together to go through the experience as a team, it puts the fun back in, makes the process more engaging and drives great results.

In most businesses, the lowest hanging fruit for improvement lives at the intersection of specialized skill sets. To foster continuous improvement, augment your existing creative team with dedicated engineering and data science or business intelligence resources to roll out innovative ideas. Analyze the results, and build on your success by improving the targeting, filtering and orchestration of your customer engagement efforts. As you increase your sophistication over time, you’ll see team confidence grow alongside your results.

The post Harnessing creativity and technology with next-generation email appeared first on Digiday.

“We’re always building and testing new features and capabilities that will help marketers reach their customers,” a LinkedIn spokesperson emailed.

These improvements on LinkedIn come three years after Microsoft bought the company, helping bring more financial resources. In May, LinkedIn bought Drawbridge, a cross-device data company. AJ Wilcox, founder of B2Linked, a LinkedIn-focused ad agency, said he saw the Drawbridge acquisition not as just as an acqui-hire but as a sign of LinkedIn bringing more cross-device targeting into the platform. LinkedIn has relied on cookie-based retargeting, which is not effective when browsers are restricting functionality. Wilcox said adding event-based retargeting such as based on percentage viewed of a video is a necessary step.

“Not only are video ad views very expensive ($0.06 per two-second view), you can’t do anything with it like you can on YouTube and on Facebook. LinkedIn understands that their targeting there is weak, and I see them making strides to address this,” Wilcox.

Indeed, LinkedIn’s pricing is consistently something that concerns marketers. When told about the upcoming retargeting features, Stephen Vujevich, director of digital strategy at Gregory, said, “I can only imagine that would be an even pricier offering given that it would be a smaller audience subset, but it’s great to see them giving the ad platform the attention it deserves. Since the Microsoft acquisition, it’s pretty evident that they’ve been systematically focusing on pain points across the platform to slowly evolve it and improve.”

Advertising on LinkedIn has significantly improved over the last two years, marketers said. Earlier this year, LinkedIn added more targeting options such as interest-based and lookalike audiences. That’s in addition to targeting by company, demographics, education and job experience and also advertisers’ using their own contact lists. LinkedIn also has made improvements to the appearance and usability of its ad platform.

“The ad manager is easier to use and looks nice. They have been upping their pixel and audience data a ton. Last year, launching LinkedIn profile targeting that you can do with Bing Ads has been great for clients. Sadly, going through Bing Ads does not make it cheaper, but being able to target LinkedIn people while they are on the Bing network is a huge start to the LinkedIn-Microsoft integration,” said Duane Brown, founder and head of strategy at Vancouver-based agency Take Some Risk.

But despite the high cost of some campaigns, LinkedIn ads continue to be worth it to many marketers.

“The CPCs can be higher with super focused targeting, but you get what you pay for in the end. This is no different than on any other ad platform. The quality of traffic is great, and the options to get such precise targeting makes it worth the cost of entry. Plus, competition is not as bad,” Brown said.

Beyond the ad platform, LinkedIn has been working to improve the product experience. Last week, LinkedIn told Axios that it altered its algorithm in the feed to boost niche professional interests and posts that are more conversational. These changes in the product should also benefit advertisers by opening up more ad inventory, said Betsy Hindman, a digital marketing consultant for business-to-business clients.

“Smarter and more relevant news-feed content will be great for the ad platform because it will increase the amount of time people spend when they are on LinkedIn and increase the frequency of visits to the site, which will give us more ad inventory and hopefully lower prices a bit. At present, the average user is on LinkedIn only a couple times a month, which means very limited and expensive ad inventory,” Hindman said.

Marketers said they hope to see improvements to help scale campaigns on the platform. Wilcox said he would like to see more bulk tools like Google’s ads editor. Vujevich said while it’s clear LinkedIn has taken a page from Facebook’s setup and deployment flow, he hopes they do more on campaign delivery and audience projection functionalities.

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“What’s unique in the U.S. is the data assets we have,” said Xandr CMO Kirk McDonald. “When we start looking to 60 new hires in Europe, it’s to make sure that we can create high-fidelity data assets in markets like the U.K. either through partnerships or ownerships.”

Partnerships, either with publishers or broadcasters, will be how AT&T gets the data needed to sell more targeted ads in its video-orientated ad marketplace, called Community.

When the marketplace launched in May, it was pitched as a one-stop shop for video inventory across WarnerMedia networks, which are also owned by AT&T, as well as from outside publisher partners like Vice and Tubu. It’s that second part of the pitch the telco hopes to lean on in Europe to ensure its marketplace powered by Xandr’s ad tech is more appealing to publishers and broadcasters than their own smaller versions. Media owners don’t have to share first-party data to sell their inventory from the marketplace, but doing so could attract more advertisers. That’s because the data would be overlaid on top of Xandr’s own deterministic data sets to allow advertisers to define additional audience segments they want to reach through the marketplace.

Any data deals struck over the coming months will be market-specific, not pan-European, said McDonald, who wants deterministic data that’s in packaged formats outside of the more commoditized location and behavioral data sets. While McDonald would not reveal which companies Xandr is currently in talks with, there are only a handful across Europe that can offer that sort of data and, more importantly, would be willing to share it. ITV, for instance, is building its own marketplace of VOD inventory it hopes will eventually sell ads for other broadcasters.

“Because of a shrinking down number of impressions, media owners are starting to understand that the lone-wolf mentality of trying to do everything themselves in advertising won’t work,” said McDonald. “There’s a realization among those businesses that they may have high-quality audiences but they don’t have scale, and so they’re looking to partnerships to get that.”

The challenge is other telcos are making similar gambits, particularly on broadcasters.

Comcast, which owns Sky and video ad company Freewheel, is making a big play around addressable TV, while RTL’s ads business, Adconnect, which has a range of ad tech firms including Spotx and Yospace, is maneuvering around streaming services. Competition will be fierce for AT&T, which is why it might make sense to play to Xandr’s ad tech strengths for now.

Publishers could be the easier route into Europe for AT&T given ad tech vendor Appnexus, which is what Xandr is built on, is one of the only firms to go toe-to-toe with Google and come up relatively unscathed. Not many firms can say they were able to steal a big publisher like Axel Springer away from Google’s ad tech like Appnexus did in 2018.

“AT&T has to strike partnerships, but it’s a highly contested market where other companies that specialize in broadcaster-quality video ad inventory are already establishing themselves,” Matti Littunen, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. “It’s going to be hard for a company like AT&T to explain to the market exactly what its selling points are versus the competition.”

Telecom firms have a love-hate relationship with advertising. An ads business, and its healthy margins, could offer some reprieve to beleaguered telcos that have seen the rise of internet-based platforms eat into revenues made by services such as text messages. Yet most telecom providers have struggled to get an ads business beyond the pilot phase. Verizon has struggled to underpin its ad technologies with its own customer data, while Three’s attempts to give advertisers anonymized data to target some of its customers have gone quiet a year after a big PR launch.

The technical know-how and technology needed to sustain an ads business is a tall ask for any company that doesn’t see advertising as a main source of revenue.

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The program has three tiers — Admirer (free to join), Enthusiast (for customers who have spent at least $250 with ThirdLove) and Devotee (for customers who have spent at least $450 with ThirdLove). Cohen said that ThirdLove decided to base the tiers on lifetime spend because lingerie isn’t a frequently replenished item, and “some customers only shop once a year with us and that’s OK.” Members of the top two tiers get access to a free seamless underwear with purchase, and early access to new products, and exclusive seasonal offerings, in addition.  All members get access to some variation of free or low-cost shipping.

ThirdLove chief creative officer Ra’el Cohen said that the company decided to create a customer loyalty program in response to customer demand — she said that it was a frequent request customers made on ThirdLove’s social media pages and through its customer service chat.

She also said that ThirdLove wanted to come up with a way to more consistently give customers access to rewards throughout the customer journey, and thought of the loyalty program as one way to do that. For example, ThirdLove, like many DTC companies, used to offer first-time customers a discount — customers who signed up for ThirdLove’s email list for the first time got a 10% off coupon. But by getting customers to sign up for a loyalty program, ThirdLove gets more information about how customers react to certain promotional and product offerings beyond just the first-time offer.

“If you kind of unpack what a traditional loyalty program is, it’s effectively giving benefits discounts and other things to customers,” Richie Siegel, founder of retail consultancy firm Loose Threads said. “I think one of the big shifts is these [DTC] brands have just done that in marketing.”

But, Cohen said that what ThirdLove found was that bundling discounting was more successful — like offering up to $40 off and free shipping when customers buy two or more bras.

“That was really the purchasing behavior we saw reflected in our customer base,” Cohen said. “A woman would buy one bra — she got a great fit, was really happy with it — and would come back and buy two or three more.”

So in the months leading up to the loyalty program launch, ThirdLove did away with its 10% discount for first-time customers. It also decided to release a tiered loyalty program, that spelled out exactly how much customers would have to spend in order to reach the next tier of the loyalty program as a way to encourage them to spend more.

The perks offered through ThirdLove’s loyalty program is similar to other new retail loyalty programs in that the brand is more interested in offering customers early or exclusive access to product, rather than only discounts. Siegel said that other offerings — free and low-cost expedited shipping — are “table stakes” for retailers today, and “is that going to move the needle? I don’t think so.”

For more established brands like Reebok who have released new loyalty programs in recent months, it’s the first time they’ve been able to collect certain pieces of customer data, or see how a customer purchases with them over time. Cohen said that ThirdLove’s loyalty program hasn’t given the brand access to any new pieces of data that they didn’t have before, but that it’s been helpful in giving ThirdLove a better way to understand what will drive its most valuable customers to purchase more.

“For us, it’s really about understanding what is the behavior for each individual tier, and what are the moments in which we can help incentivize women to get to that next tier and earn that higher rewards status,” Cohen said.

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This is part of the Journal’s plan to root out so-called “deepfakes,” content that has been manipulated by artificial intelligence, which has been a growing concern for publishers like Reuters and The Washington Post over the last year.

Heightened political tensions, increasingly sophisticated technology and the speed at which fake content can spread, has elevated the importance in spotting these fakes.

“We hear there will be a massive proliferation in technology in a couple of years which will coincide with the U.S. general election,” said Francesco Marconi, the Journal’s research and development chief. “That’s a perfect storm, technology is evolving so quickly, it’s an important inflection point. We want to be proactive.”

Like most underbelly areas of the internet, Marconi first came across the term “deepfake” on Reddit after seeing this academic paper on manipulating a video of Barack Obama in 2018. This, combined with a lot of activity in universities and research centers into the growth of deepfakes, spurred the R&D team to form the WSJ Media Forensics committee, a joint effort between the Standards & Ethics team and R&D.

The Journal also invites academics and researchers to give regular talks on new detection technology. It has written newsroom guides and holds training sessions — Marconi estimates between 120 and 150 WSJ journalists have participated. It also monitors the different detection tools being developed by major tech companies and startups. For now, training is not mandatory. Although the technology and tools are improving to spot fakes, standard journalistic process, like thoroughly checking sources, still apply.

Understanding the scale of the problem is tricky, but there are some indications. Cybersecurity startup DeepTrace has detected over 8,000 fake pornographic videos on adult entertainment sites. Like a lot of new technology, AI-manipulated videos have roots in the porn industry. In 2018, Google searches for “deepfakes” were 1,000 times higher than in 2017. A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in January into the makeup of all academic papers about AI, found that neural networks (the main approach used for these doctored videos) were mentioned in 25% of the papers, more than any other machine-learning method.

What makes it even trickier is a lot of doctored videos are not malicious but done for comedic or satirical effect. The Salvador Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, for instance, has used AI to bring the artist back to life to greet visitors.

“There are good intentions, but there will always be bad actors,” said Marconi. “We saw a proliferation of types of manipulated media has negative consequences to journalism and society. We decided it was a threat to our news-gathering process.”

Marconi wasn’t able to share how many fake videos the Journal’s committee has come across or details of the process it has developed to spot them due to newsroom politics.

The next battlefield is audio. Marconi cited an example of manipulated audio of Donald Trump and Barack Obama speaking Mandarin. “It’s a different monster, and it’s scary; there’s no way the human ear can tell.”

Like with a lot of offshoots from AI, headlines have over-hyped the phenomenon, but Marconi attributes this more to artificial intelligence itself. “At least from the deep-fake standpoint, it’s better for there to be a lot of awareness than to miss it completely,” he said.

Headlines have bubbled up about a doctored video of a speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi. The video, which surfaced in May, tried to make the politician appear drunk. Facebook, keen to avoid editorial responsibility, was criticized for not removing the video, clips of which had 2.5 million views, admitting an “execution mistake.” The video now seems to have disappeared. In retaliation, fake videos of Mark Zuckerberg spread around the internet.

As the proliferation of deepfakes grows, Facebook and other platforms’ stance on balancing freedom of speech with restricting the spread of misinformation will again come under pressure. But avoiding censorship is an increasingly thorny issue, he said: “How do you balance censorship with freedom of speech in the age where machines can create this content?”

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In spending more, the company is facing the typical DTC growth hurdles and attribution woes. At the same time, it is also actively looking to fill three c-suite roles including a new chief marketing officer, chief brand officer and chief financial officer (the company declined to share more detail about its c-suite search).

Its strategy is still heavily dependent on video, which has been key to the brand’s breakout strategy in the crowded DTC mattress category. This past week, it debuted new ads on TV and a branded content series on YouTube with comedy group JK Studios, which will have a new show, Bring the Funny, on NBC this summer. Purple is hoping that as JK Studios’ audience grows so too will Purple’s, said Dan Bischoff, senior director of acquisitions for Purple.

The company has also migrated its native ad spend to Verizon Media Group. In March, Verizon Media Group released a case study with Purple which showed that working with Verizon on interactive native ad formats helped Purple beat its return on advertising spend benchmarks by 130%.

Adding more than a dozen channels to the media mix, coupled with the ability to purchase the brand’s mattresses across more channels online and physically, has made it more difficult for the company to figure out which media buys to attribute sales to. That’s why Purple is focused on figuring out attribution so that it can then decide where to spend more on media.

Media buying is done by an in-house team as well as external agencies including Modus Direct (for television), Agency Inside (digital) and SMI (audio and podcasts). Having an in-house media team as well as an in-house data team has an impact on the strategy, as the company is constantly changing where it is spending. “You have to tweak it as you see it,” said Bischoff. “There’s no set it and forget it with this stuff. It’s constant. We have to tweak it as we go.”

In 2018, Purple spent $17 million in media online, outdoor, television, newspaper, magazine and radio, per Kantar Media. That’s up significantly from 2017’s $1.6 million spent, per Kantar, which also reported that Purple spent $6.7 million in the first quarter of 2019 compared to $3.6 million in the first quarter of 2018. As previously reported by Digiday, the company was sold in 2017 for $1.1 billion to Global Partner Acquisition Corp. Bischoff declined to share how much the company is spending or break out percentages or increases of where the company is spending more.

In the last year-and-a-half, Purple has built out a physical presence in 1,100 stores across the U.S., including Mattress Firm, Macy’s, Denver Mattress and Bed Bath & Beyond. Another issue is that Purple’s longer sell cycle, as it could be anywhere from three months to a year between when someone sees an ad and buys a mattress.

“You have multiple places where people can buy your products — they might see an ad on YouTube, they might see it on TV, then see some retargeted ads on Facebook and then they go on buy in the Mattress Firm,” said Bischoff. “We lose that attribution.”

“Purple might be one of the most comprehensive testers in the space,” said DTC strategist and consultant Nik Sharma, adding that attribution woes are not unique to Purple’s growth but typical of growing DTC brands. “Most DTC brands can comfortably spend $5 million to $10 million a month on Facebook pretty efficiently. But with offline, there’s no perfect way to track attribution, unfortunately. There’s no official way to figure out attribution.”

Myriad DTC brands have moved from spending primarily on Facebook and Google to more traditional media channels. In doing so, the data-heavy brands have found growing pains similar to Purple not only with attribution but with figuring out how to expand a physical presence, what products to create and if they should enter new categories.

In the early days of Purple, the company focused on online video, which was typically cheaper to buy than search terms, as numerous competitors spending on the mattress category’s search terms drove up the keyword price to roughly $20 per click. As the company gained brand recognition, it was able to run its search based on its own brand name which was cheaper than keywords like “best mattress.” Now, as the company is spending across various channels it is using its in-house data team to figure out how to attribute what’s working and what’s not.

“Attribution gets a lot muddier,” said Bischoff. “The more CPMs you get, the more shitty impressions you get, too.”

Purple wants to fix that by figuring out multi-touch attribution. “[That’s] probably the marketer’s dilemma of today,” said Bischoff. “Google and Facebook don’t communicate with each other very well. One person will see an ad on Google, one person will see an ad on Facebook and that person will convert. Facebook and Google and whatever other channel you may be running your ads from all claim that same conversion. If you pulled revenue from each different platform it would say we are double our revenue for this year.”

The company is aiming to solve that headache by having its data team figure out directional data of what its attribution is along the various consumer touch points. “Once we get a better idea of what’s influencing a decision the most, then we can spend some more dollars into the different areas,” said Bischoff.

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