Hear how Lotame’s data management platform (DMP) has helped leading media companies increase CPMs, sell more media, and improve ROI. Learn more about how Lotame works with publishers around the globe at https://www.lotame.com/solutions/publishers/
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View Highlights from Lotame Spark Client Summit 2017
Check out some of the key highlights from our must-attend conference for Data Management Platform clients! Lotame Spark Client Summit 2017, March 7th in NYC. #LotameSpark
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Lotame Spark Client Summit 2017: Data Quality and Fraud
Hear from panelists Patrick Dolan, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, IAB; Kim Riedell, Senior Vice President of Partnerships and Business Development, Advantage Media Solutions; Grant Whitmore, Executive Vice President, Digital, New York Daily News; and Tyler Paxton, Founder & CTO, Are You A Human. Moderated by Jason Downie, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Data Solutions, Lotame. Lotame Spark Client Summit 2017, March 7th in NYC. #LotameSpark
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Walmart is developing a personal-shopper service for rich moms — and a store with no cashiers
This ain’t your grandpa’s Walmart.
When Walmart paid $3 billion for Jet.com and its founder Marc Lore, the promise was that the entrepreneur would help the retailer appeal to new types of customers.
Here’s the next step in that evolution.
A new Walmart subsidiary, called Code Eight, has recently started testing a personal shopping service for “busy NYC moms,” according to multiple sources, with the goal of letting them get product recommendations and make purchases simply through text messaging.
The target customer of Code Eight is described in an online job listing as a “high net worth urban consumer” — translation: A rich city dweller — certainly not the historical sweet spot for Walmart’s main business.
Household items are delivered for free within 24 hours; other purchases are delivered within two business days. Returns are picked up for free at a customer’s apartment building or house.
Walmart’s startup incubator, Store No. 8, is also working on another under-the-radar project, dubbed Project Kepler. This effort aims to reimagine the in-store shopping experience with the help of technologies like computer vision.
Multiple people familiar with the project tell Recode that one goal of the initiative is the creation of physical stores that would operate without checkout lines or cashiers — in a similar fashion to Amazon’s futuristic Amazon Go store, which was announced a year ago but has yet to open to the public.
A Walmart spokesperson declined to comment.
Taken together, these Walmart initiatives mark a major leap in the vision for the type of businesses Walmart will operate, and customers it will serve, five or 10 years down the line. But since both business strategies are in early stages, there is no guarantee that either will develop into a long-term business or launch widely.
Walmart had previously announced that Rent the Runway co-founder Jennifer Fleiss is heading up Code Eight, but has revealed little to no details about the startup.
Recode has learned that Code Eight plans to eventually charge a membership fee, but current testers are using it for free. The personal-shopping service is currently focused on items in “health & beauty, household essentials and apparel/accessories” categories, according to a job listing. It’s not clear if the startup is sourcing this inventory from Walmart and its subsidiaries, or from outside retailers.
Code Eight has told early users that they can order products simply by texting a photo of it. They can also message with a general request for a type of product they need, and leave it up to the service to pick the specific item for them; customers fill out a survey upon joining that is supposed to help personalize their experience.
One source says that the Code Eight product has the appearance of an automated bot, but seems like a human is actually the one communicating on the other end of the message. That may change over time.
“[W]e set our sights on taking the lead in conversational commerce by leveraging machine learning, NLP, and personalization algorithms,” a Code Eight job listing reads. NLP refers to natural language processing — essentially, how a computer turns a human’s spoken or written request into instructions it can process.
The Project Kepler project focused on the future of in-store shopping is being led by Mike Hanrahan, the co-founder and former chief technology officer for Jet.com, multiple sources tell Recode. It is located in Hoboken, N.J., where Jet is based.
A Project Kepler job listing for a “computer vision engineer” says that the role will involve creating a “best-in-class consumer experience in the physical retail space.”
Amazon’s Go concept uses a combination of sensors and cameras to track what each store shopper takes off of shelves so it can automatically bill them for their purchase without their having to stop to pay on the way out. The store’s launch has been severely delayed, however, with reports that the technology did not work well when the store was crowded.
Walmart is envisioning a similar system that would potentially eliminate the need for cashiers in stores outfitted with the technology. Walmart has more than two million employees worldwide, many of whom work at checkout.
But it’s possible that the Project Kepler technology would be used in new types of store formats, rather than be retrofitted for existing stores. This project is just one of several across Walmart focused on what the retail store of the future should look like, according to a source.
The BBC is using facial coding and eye tracking to prove its branded content works
Proving the effectiveness of branded content has been an industry fixation in 2017, BBC StoryWorks, the branded-content arm of the broadcaster’s commercial division BBC Global News, is offering clients facial-coding and eye-tracking tools to show its branded content works, the fruits of two years of research.
Chinese phone maker Huawei is the first client to use these tools for its four-part video campaign “The Explorers.” One of the two-minute videos features an interview with former NASA astronaut Ron Garan. The content is viewed by a sample of the BBC’s global panel of 12,000 members — for Huawei, the sample was 400 — with facial-recognition and eye-tracking software activated through their desktop webcams. Facial movements are recorded on a second-by-second basis and then divided into six possible emotions: sadness, puzzlement, happiness, fear, rejection and surprise. Eye-tracking software indicates which part of the content, which could also be text-based, triggers the emotion.
After the campaign, StoryWorks offers analysis on how the content delivered against brand metrics. Compared to a control group, those who saw the Huawei campaign recorded a 216 percent increase in brand awareness, a 23 percent uptick in brand association and a 19 percent increase in purchase intent, according to the BBC insights team, which couldn’t share exact numbers.
“We want to use science to ascertain the emotional impact of content,” said Richard Pattinson, svp of BBC StoryWorks. “We see a clear correlation between audience engagement and brand impact; we want to use this when we commission with our partners. My focus in 2018 is to understand engagement better. We’re long past engagement [for content] being dwell times and pageviews.”
BBC Global News’ insights team has been researching how emotion relates to brand metrics for the last two years. Its “Science of Engagement” study, in partnership with facial-coding company CrowdEmotion, has won awards.
“We see a strong correlation between serious emotions like fear and positive uplifts in brand awareness,” said Pattinson. “Eliciting more challenging emotions is legitimate. It demonstrates empathy and understanding as a brand.”
Understanding which part of content elicits an emotional response can play into a brand’s distribution strategy. For instance, audiences might feel puzzled during a certain section of a two-minute video, which could then be cut and distributed on social media with the idea that more people will share it.
As with most data-related decisions, these tools are more likely to reinforce hunches rather than break new ground. Pattinson notes that they are not used to create ideas but achieve better cut-through in a crowded content market. “This is the science that helps the art show its full potential,” he said. “It demonstrates why it has been effective for the brand.”
Pattinson also said the tools could help brands understand what content relates to which part of the purchase funnel, which could inform distribution cycles, depending on the campaign objectives. For Huawei, the campaign objectives were more about driving awareness than driving purchase. Four other brands are using StoryWorks’ tools to help demonstrate brand outcomes as a result of emotional engagement, although StoryWorks couldn’t disclose their names. With this added research, the hope is clients are more likely to renew contracts with StoryWorks. Media companies like Vice and The Telegraph are increasingly beefing up the information they can give to clients to prove the effectiveness of their ads.
Since April, StoryWorks has closed over a hundred branded-content deals globally. In early 2016, Pattinson said revenue from branded content was roughly 30 percent of overall ad sales; now, he said it’s closer to 45 percent. StoryWorks has offices in London, New York, Singapore and Sydney with roughly 36 employees, including strategists, project managers, writers, developers and social media managers, among others.
As StoryWorks offers the tools to more clients as planned, it will need to hire more staffers, particularly because post-campaign analysis is bespoke, depending on campaign objectives. “This can only be valuable with the right degree of attention,” said Pattinson, “but bits of it are very scalable.”
Image courtesy of BBC StoryWorks
Stitch Fix’s TV advertising push attracted new customers. One problem: They want cheaper stuff.
So Stitch Fix is giving it to them.
Online personal styling service Stitch Fix stepped up its advertising spending by 84 percent in the first quarter of its 2018 fiscal year, with TV campaigns playing a big role in trying to attract new customers.
But the new customers attracted by the mass-market commercials had one common piece of feedback: Stitch Fix needs to offer a bigger selection of less-expensive clothing. CEO Katrina Lake told Recode in an interview following today’s release of Q1 results — its first earnings report as a public company — that these consumers want more options in the $20 to $50 price range.
So Stitch Fix plans to give these new customers more of what they want.
“In the last year, lower price point product has grown to represent a double-digit percentage of our total unit sales,” the company said in a letter to shareholders announcing the financial results. “Given the success of this offering, we plan to increase lower price point sales as a percentage of overall sales over the course of this fiscal year.”
In its first few years of existence, Stitch Fix’s selection of clothing items skewed mid-tier — higher than the range mentioned above, but lower than those of premium brands. But in the past year, the company has started to sell name-brands at premium price points, in addition to beefing up the selection in the $20 to $50 range.
On the company’s earnings call with analysts, Lake was asked what the lower-price push would mean for profit margins. She did not offer specifics on the profitability makeup of the different price points, but said Stitch Fix “can serve very profitably” these value shoppers.
Average order values, on the other hand, would be lower for these customers, but would be largely offset by new sales of high-price premium brands, she said.
For the quarter, Stitch Fix reported revenue earnings and profits that were generally in line with analyst estimates. First-quarter revenue grew 25 percent to $296 million year over year, while the company netted $13.5 million in net income.
But Stitch Fix’s stock was trading down as much as 12 percent in the after-hours market, perhaps over concerns that the company did not provide a forecast for net income.
It’s moving slowly, but Pinterest and other tech companies are becoming less white and less male
Pinterest released its latest diversity report on Tuesday.
Slowly but surely, Pinterest is getting more diverse.
The company released its annual workforce diversity report on Tuesday, and claims that underrepresented minorities now make up 9 percent of its workforce, up from just 7 percent in 2016. Pinterest is also hiring more female employees: Women account for 45 percent of Pinterest’s workforce, up from 44 percent last year, according to this latest report.
The data represents advances compared to 2016 government data published earlier this year. And while the changes from year to year may seem small, the company is chipping away at those diversity proportions.
Here’s how Pinterest’s workforce has changed since 2014:
Women make up a larger percentage of Pinterest’s workforce than they did three years ago, and they also claim more technical jobs inside the company, roles that have traditionally been dominated by men. Women still account for 19 percent of Pinterest’s leadership positions, the same percentage the company had in 2014, but up slightly over the past two years.
Underrepresented minorities — people who are black, LatinX or Native American — also make up a larger percentage of Pinterest’s overall workforce. Minority employees make up a larger percentage of Pinterest’s technical and leadership groups than they did three years ago.
Here’s how Pinterest’s diversity report compares to similar reports from other tech companies. Silicon Valley has been making a push over the past few years to diversify the tech industry for a number of reasons, one of which is to bring in employees with a more diverse range of experiences and ideas. As you can see, Pinterest has a higher percentage of female employees than most other Silicon Valley giants.
Candice Morgan, Pinterest’s head of Inclusion & Diversity, says the company has instituted a number of programs in order to increase diversity, including Pinterest’s own version of the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview at least one minority candidate for top jobs like head coach. Pinterest’s version of the rule requires the company to interview at least one qualified female and underrepresented minority for each senior-level opening.
Pinterest also has an apprenticeship program to encourage candidates from nontraditional tech backgrounds to apply, and requires employees to complete an unconscious-bias training course in their first week on the job.
Drug and Alcohol Deaths at U.S. Workplaces Soar
The number of American deaths at work from unintentional drug and alcohol overdoses jumped more than 30% in 2016, new government data shows, showing that the U.S. struggle with a deadly opioid epidemic is migrating to the workplace.
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Introducing DMNotes
Welcome to DMNotes, the relaunched DMN blog that covers everything from marketing strategy to politics to data to social media. If it’s happening and we have a point-of-view on it, we’ll cover it here. Also, we will use this space to update our recent stories and let you know about the interesting virtual and real-life events we’re creating.
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Does Your Data Management Need Some Spring Cleaning? [Infographic]
Poor data quality and integration can cause a marketing mess.
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