Web Analytics & E-commerce (EN)

2nd day at ad:tech London 2011

The second day of conferences at ad:tech London 2011 was introduced by a keynote of Andy Hart, general manager, advertiser & online division, Microsoft. According to Hart, the digital consumer is dispersed, disruptive and in control. One of the key aspects of the recent evolution of media is the ability for humans to share easily stories worldwide. In the recent past, this was only available to large corporations. With Google, Microsoft, you can get reach to mass audiences in one day. The new platforms of entertainement also  remove the power from advertisers and advertising companies. The consumers are changing behavior while watching TV. Not only they watch TV alone and with friends & family, but also dispersed by connecting at the same time on social medias. Several tools are now used to watch TV: slate, smartphone, connected TV, computer and console. On top of these tools, they are using the Web, apps and social media. We are still at a stage where technology is too present, where we should be more focusing on creativity. Cloud changes everything. Enables to correlate different data sources. Connected world changes the way consumers interact with the brands. Children of today and tomorrow have the control. They are the one providing the media platform. We have to accept, acknowledge and encourage that.

For the rest of the morning, I have been jumping between sessions in the two tracks: e-commerce and video.

In the e-commerce track, Ilicco Elia, head of mobile LBi, shared his vision and experience on social retailing. According to Elia, we are at a tipping point. The end to end journey needs to be considered more than ever before, to achieve excellence in ecommerce. This is what they call “Flow” at LBi. By concentrating on the major flows, better attention should be achieved through better narrative.

3 majors flows :
-    Flow in payments: payment barriers lower the price threshold for consideration. Idea that payment becomes simpler, faster and more secure, lowers this barrier
-    Flow in social interaction: greater expectation of presence and opinions on Friends during the shopping process.
-    Flow in channels : increasing reliance on the presence of the phone. Phone becomes the central point of digital experience (24/24 with someone).

Regarding social shopping, retail has been pretty slow to adopt new technologies for the last 20 years. With social networks, it is now possible to have an integrated social shopping experience, by taking and sharing photos of items to be bought Friends are in your pocket all the time. This helps you decide because people you know help you in the buying process. Technology should be brought to help you in stores (interactive kiosks, touchpad screens, etc.)

 

In the video track, Mads Holman from Go Viral, made an interesting presentation labeled “Real TV and brands : beautiful conversation with customers”. According to Holman, we are in an attention economy.  “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” Hebert Simon, 1971. The internet has gone through 3 main phases: 1996-2001 : the driver was access, the main advertising format was banners and the aim was to create awareness. 2002-2008: the driver turned to speed, the main advertising format was search and the aim was geared to performance. Since 2009, the driver has become social, the main advertising format video apps and the aim emotion.

For the last two years, a perfect storm has occurred with all barriers to entry dropping radically at the same time. Facebook has collected 140 billions photos. 25 % of photos taken on the planet will end up on Facebook. Time spent on on demand video will be higher that live broadcast in the next few years. Visit to brand web site is dropping: you have to go and find people where they are (social medias)

Coca Cola has developed a liquid and linked strategy. Classical ways to produce content is not going to work anymore. Have to think in days instead of months. Work with smaller production video companies in order to be able to adjust strategy rapidly. Google Story on super bowl ad. Google has done right of bridging digital and real world in the same ad. Users demand more deep brands.

How to come up with a format that stays reasonable in termes of budgets? Create initial momentum. “We’re not in the business of keeping the media companies alive. We’re in the business of connecting with consumers”. Trevor Edward, Vice President, Global Brand & Category Managmeent, Nike. Example : contest “The chance” at facebook.com/Nikeacademy. The promise is to bring young kids the best soccer training in the world. Kids need to create a facebook page with videos of themselves and have people to vote on the best kids to receive the best training. 150 K applications. A reality show is done online with players sharing their experience. Nike has created a format that helps generate additional content by itself. Solves a lot of problems brands are facing.

Implications for planning : every company is a media company. Content : authenticity and identity. Media : Syndication to an on demand world. It is not about conversion. It is about persuasion (brand goals, action goals or conversion goals).

During the lunch break, a buffet was available to all conference attendees, which is a great way to meet new persons and to network.



The afternoon sessions were organized in two main tracks: entertainment and mobile.

Simon Morgan, UK head of mobile advertising sales at Google, started with a few statistical examples:
•    53 % of us have already performed dual screening (watching TV and smart phone at the same time)
•    98 % use smartphones at home
•    26 % of us have used or smartphones in waiting rooms
•    24 % intentionnaly carry a smartphone when shopping to compare prices and for information
•    18 % of entertainment queries are on mobile

Not only should mobile be integrated in the overall strategy, but also an efficient mobile destination should be created. Mobile optimized campaigns drive results : +43 % conversion, +80 % click through rate. Therefore, it is important to separate mobile search campaigns from desktop search campaigns. In general mobile CPC is cheaper. Google will also start to penalize ads that don’t go to a mobile optimized site.



Just when the Google mobile presentation was finished, I jumped to the gaming session titled “From console to multi platform digital advertising opportunity”. According to David Rose, CEO of We R Interactive, the traditional gaming model did not support scaling and volume. Consequently, only the dominant actors remain in this sector. With the advent of applications on smartphones and Facebook, a new ecology is appearing in 2011 where small actors can succeed in a new gaming market, where an audience exists and is participating in huge numbers. Game mechanics must be used to drive interactive and engagement. Claudio Annicchiarico, head of digital UK & Ireland for Fiat Auto, explained thereafter the social media and gaming strategy implemented by Alfa Roméo. The strategy was in several steps: 1. Listening to customers on social medias 2. Building a social experience 3. Managing a social customer service and 4. Becoming a social platform. In the automotive media mix, the role of social media is to generate awareness, liking and consideration to purchase by nurturing prospects with engaging content. The end goal is to move users through the following funnel  : Advertising > Search > Social > Portal > ECRM

Back in the mobile track, Evan Krauss, executive VP of advertising at Shazam Entertainement, was presenting on “Beyond the banner. To be frank, I was a little skeptical to learn anything new during this conference about a topic that has been so much talked about for the last 10 years. To my surprise, Krauss’ presentation was both interesting and operational. To start with, he explained why there is an interest to interact with banner advertising: #1. Get more details on the product, #2 : save for later, #3 : share with others and #4 : buy. So then, why do we need to use a second screen on a mobile in addition to the TV one? #1. Scale #2. More engaging experiences #3. Not disruptive (as on a TV screen while others as still watching), #4 : Personal (unlike TV) and #5. Portable. According to Krauss, 60 % of us pick our phone during commercials.

Going back to Shazam, it is the 4th largest app of all times with. 150 million users while the company is only 18 months old. While Shazam has been originally designed to recognize music playing on the radio with a mobile or desktop application (and link to a store to buy the music online), it can now also recognize a specific commercial in order to link to additional content and advertising

Is this working? 27 % of consumers that shazamed Old Navy commercials went shopping from their couch. 80 % overall engagement : after people shazamed commercial, they engaged into it. 35 % tweeted and 30 % watched a video. In one campaign, 75 % who shazamed the commercial visited the mobile site.

At the end of the conference, Gail Power, director online sales & operations EMEA for Facebook, keynoted on “Fans are just the beginning”. She started to explain that sharing is increasing rapidly with interactions between people doubling on Facebook between June 2010 and January 2011. Industries are transforming by organizing around people : Amazon (integration with Facebook),  Groupon and Cityville for instance. During the Royal Weeding, 6,8 M status updates and 9,4 M comments were recorded.

She continued by comparing traditional online marketing with bowling, where the same ball is always sent on the same target. Facebook is more like pinball where the ball changes direction at each time and grows momentum over time. Regarding Facebook ads, people are 4 times more likely to purchase when friends like an ad. Fans  are more valuable when they impact their friends

Build / Engage and Amplify. More fans you get, more opportunites you have.

• Step 1 : build a page. Create an identity for your brand. Express your brand through publishing photos and conversations. Use like ads to build your fan base.
• Step 2 : engage your fans. Publish to your fans. Set up a regular and frequent publishing calendar. Create social experiences that are easy to share
• Step 3 : amplify

Sponsored stories are a new way to scale word of mouth The web organized around people creates new opportunities. Businesses are transforming how they relate to people and operate. Companies recognizing this shift are gaining strategic advantage New features and enhancements coming.

Unfortunately, Power’s presentation was short on breaking news, since big announcements were being made at the same day during the Facebook developer’s conference in San Francisco. She concluded that “The journey is 1 % finished.”, which is quite encouraging for the future of the digital marketing industry!



Ad:tech London 2012 will take place on September 19-20, 2012 at Olympia. I’ll do my best to come back!!!

TO READ ALSO:

• My article on the first day at ad:tech London 2011
• Adtech London Twitter Charts, Scanblog
• Adtech (Londres) : vie privée et Internet, Henri Kaufman
• Failing Forward Slides 1st part, Russ Lidstone
• Failing Forward Slides 2nd part, Russ Lidstone

1st day at ad:tech London 2011

Fresh off the Eurostar from Lille (Northern France), today was my first day ever at ad:tech London, the event for digital marketing in the UK!

Located in the beautiful Olympia National Hall, built in 1886 and made of iron, brick and glass, ad:tech is organized in two levels. On the ground floor, an exhibition area with 200+ booths and 6 seminar rooms with presentations performed by exhibitors. On the gallery level, an international conference is held in two large conference rooms (with an entrance fee on a conference or day-basis).


The baseline for this year’s edition is “what really matters in digital”. Nike’s brand communications director for global football Ed Elworthy opened the international conference by sharing his vision for the future.

The conference then breaked out in two tracks: Social Media and Data & Content. I decided to attend the Social Media track. Marc de Swaan Arons, chairman of EffectiveBrands and co-author of “The Global Brand CEO”, explained how social media forces corporations to rethink their brand purpose and total customer experience. By clarifying and communicating a purposeful positioning to their employees, corporations will ensure social media readiness, where every employee will become a company’s ambassador by their interactions with customers on social medias or elsewhere.

Luca Benini, Europe managing director for Buddy Media, explained then that social is the natural evolution of the Web. If you take Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, our basic needs on the Web have been fulfilled by search engine companies like Google. To fulfill higher needs in the hierarchy, that is to say belonging, esteem and self-actualization, new companies have emerged like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. According to Benini, social has a powerful impact on your business and is reshaping the way we have to consider consumers. In the past, customers where mainly perceived on the direct revenue generated. In the social era, customers have also to be considered as brand advocates. 90 % of all purchases are indeed subject to social influence. On average 3,2 visitors are generated per share. It is also predicted that Social Commerce should amount to 30 G$ worldwide in 2015. On an analytical standpoint, social commerce should be measured by revenue generated, products sold and customers acquired by sharing on social medias (for instance : average revenue per share, average conversion per share and average visits per share). The morning sessions were concluded by a case study of social experiments performed on Philips Wake Up Light (http://www.facebook.com/philipshealthyliving). Thanks to several initiatives on social medias, Philips was able to increase market share by 17 % in the Netherlands.

The afternoon conferences were organized on two tracks: Privacy and Performance Marketing. I did attend a mix of conferences in the two tracks, along with some seminars in the ground floor.

Dave Williams’ conference on Facebook Marketing KPIs was pretty packed. Williams clearly stated in his introduction that Facebook should be used as an engagement platform and not a ROI platform. By advertising on Facebook, you should consider yourself at a cocktail party and not at a yard sale. People are not browsing on Facebook with an immediate intent to buy. Facebook is an operating system of ads based on intent and social graph. In the near future, this should also power mobile, display, search and video ad delivery. Facebook’s penetration is quite different depending on the countries : 48,2 % in the UK, 36,4 % in Belgium, 33,5 % in France, 30,5 % in Italy and 29,5 % in Germany. In terms of KPIs, the presentation focused primarly on CPSA (Cost per Social Action) and the different levers to optimize it : frequency, creativity and impression volumes of ads. Facebook wds perform better when they have a social context (recommended by friends). A case study of Facebook Marketing on Domino Pizza’s in the UK was briefly presented with an increase of 440 % in the overall fan base, cost fan acquisition was reduced by 73 % and Domino’s Pizza UK sales via Facebooj increased 300 %.

In the privacy track, a panel with Dave Evans from the Information Commissioner’s Office, Greg Smith from Evidon and Alex Fowler from Mozilla, was discussing “what to do privacy laws mean for brands?”. Greg Smith emphasized the opt-out capabilities of Evidon, a company specializing in powering the Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising of the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA). Evidon created the Open Data Partnership (ODP), which allows consumers to manage their online profiles, and it operates the popular Ghostery browser extension, giving people even more control over their online experiences. On the Mozilla side, Fowler’s stressed the recurring improvements in the Firefox browser to better communicate to uses what companies are doing with their data. However, privacy compliance rests with data owner and the party who has collected the data. In recent updates of Firefox, it is possible to activate do not track features directly into the browser. All panelists agreed that we need to continue to educate the public and the industry more. 85 % of Google users don’t opt out even if Google provides this functionality in the preferences. They concluded that we are still at the beginning of providing transparency with preferences management and there is still a long way to go to provide full transparency.

The last conference I attended was the one of Nate Elliott, vice president at Forrester Research titled “In the age of the customer, only customer-obsessed companies can survive disruption”.  His take was that completion has changed forever in recent years. After the age of manufacturing (1900-1960),  the age of distribution (1960-1990), the age of information (1990-2010) , we have now moved into the age of the customer since 2010. With smart mobile devices, social technology, persuasive video and cloud computing services, empowered customers have washed away previous sources of dominance. To survive in the new era, you should shift your focus to become customer-obsessed, which implies to shift your budget to seek realtime insights (and build products customers will embrace) as well as to spend on customer experience and service. Companies should obsess about repeat business over new, and prioritize end users overs channels. Marketing should also be shifted away from one-way ads to useful interactive content. Disruption in your business is the new normal.

The day was concluded by an impressive ad:tech networking extravaganza at the Gallery level. A great opportunity to meet other people in the digital marketing community in the UK, as well as bloggers from France!

Christophe Asselin, head of ad:tech UK, was pretty satisfied by the attendance of this first day : “Despite the continuing economic difficulty, the digital industry is growing and ad:tech recorded our busiest show this year and we are delighted to beat the ambient morosity. Come and cheer up with us.”

See you tomorrow for the summary of my second day at ad:tech London!

 

Blogging from ad:tech London on September 21-22, 2011

ad:tech is an international series of digital advertising and technology conferences and exhibitions for the interactive marketing community. The conferences take place in North America, Europe, Asia and Australie throughout the year.

The only event in Europe will be held on September 21-22, 2011 in London. My home town, Lille (Northern France), is only 80 minutes away by train from London, so it was very difficult to resist to the temptation to attend the very interesting and promising conference program with great keynote speakers.

A summary of the main conferences at ad:tech London will be available on this blog, as well as on my Twitter feed @nicolasmalo.

Innovation will be one of the main topics of the conferences, with keynote speakers from Nike, Facebook, Google, Orange, YouTube, Disney, Virgin, Forrester, eBay, Amazon, and Forbes.

The detailed list of conferences is available on the ad:tech web site HERE. The following topics have already catched my attention and I am looking forward to hearing these presentations:

• How data and analytics are shifting the display advertising landscape
• The digital consumer: dispersed, disruptive and in control
• Using social data to determine your most profitable customers & connections
• Social Retailing - creating immersive experiences that engage the consumer in new ways
• Facebook Marketing KPIs

100+ free seminars are also available during the two days.

If you are also in the area during the two days, please let me know!