Month: May 2014

Changes in consumer behaviour and the reality of the omnichannel customer are driving brands to gain ever-deeper market and customer understanding. With multiple and diverse data sources and innovative analytics, organisations now have an unprecedented opportunity to transform every customer interaction. However, for marketing, the new customer dynamic is creating huge pressure to deliver not only personalisation, but real-time one-to-one personalisation. According to the results of a recent research survey undertaken by Celebrus Technologies and Teradata, almost half of all respondents (44%) are already doing some degree of real-time personalisation – a figure that is set to rise to 75% in the next two years. As Katharine Hulls (pictured) explains, to realise the vision and benefits of real-time personalisation, organisations need to step out of the aggregated data comfort zone.

Understanding personalisation

Will 2014 be the year personalisation, indeed real-time personalisation, becomes a prerequisite? Over the past two years, organisations have tried to exploit traditional offline database marketing techniques, such as segmentation, to gain new insight about individual online customer behaviour. However, they have struggled, due to the lack of detailed data.

Yet, according to a recent survey carried out by MyCustomer.com on behalf of Celebrus Technologies and Teradata, more than half (51%) of respondents say personalisation is either very important or critical to their efforts today. This rises to a phenomenal 80% in two years.

In the future, not only do companies plan to embrace website and mobile personalisation but over three quarters of respondents (78%) predict that they will be making use of data in real-time in the next two years.

Aggregated data

But let’s get this clear: organisations need to take a radically different approach to data collection, storage and analysis to get anywhere near truly effective real-time one-to-one personalisation. To date, organisations have relied on aggregated data – and for good reasons. Aggregated data has provided essential insight into online behaviour that can be used to understand paths and journeys, build a better website and engage senior management with all important reporting.

However, aggregate data cannot reveal the individual customer journey or their needs and preferences. It cannot be used to understand how a specific customer arrived, browsed, searched or moved about the website. Essentially, without this level of individual customer activity information, how can a business achieve relevant, real-time one-to-one engagement?

Detailed data

Today, 25% of organisations are using individual level interaction data according to the survey results. These organisations are now able to undertake far more effective, personalised activity across multiple channels to drive better customer engagement and conversion. For example, knowing exactly which individuals browsed a specific product, such as slow-moving item, enables the creation of highly targeted multi-channel communications to help shift the excess stock.

Real-time website personalisation can also be enhanced by using basket affinity analysis. This method showcases which products are put into a basket at the same time and in what order to then present relevant offers during the online check-out process, increasing both cross-sell revenue and basket size. Alternatively, insight into which products are most frequently bought together created using product affinity analysis can be used to drive targeted content within order confirmation or shipping notification emails.

It is real-time data that is also key to creating personalised offers and engagement that reflect the many diverse ways an individual interacts with a brand. From the different devices used at a particular time of day; to an individual’s preferences for online, telephone or in store engagement dependent upon product type or weekday versus weekend; even full-price versus sale, detailed multi-channel data is becoming crucial.

Omnichannel view

So how does this work in practice? A retailer combining online data with transactional, loyalty and social graph information to attain deep customer understanding can prioritise high value or very socially influential individuals if stock is limited – thus avoiding out of stock situations for the most valuable customers which could impact not just that sale but future purchases and brand perception.

Of course, web analytics based on aggregated data clearly still has a huge role to play in providing critical insight into overall business performance and strategic direction. But it is time to extend that data: technology for online data capture, storage and analytics can now deliver that essential segment of one that will be key to meeting escalating customer expectation and fast evolving cross-channel engagement. To achieve true one-to-one real-time personalisation across all channels, organisations need to go for detail.

 Katharine Hulls is VP marketing, Celebrus Technologies.

Join the war on website piracy, says Mary Shields (pictured below).

The City of London police (CLP) recently called for advertisers and brand holders to actively support their work in tackling online crime, particularly their initiative to disrupt online advertising revenues generated through placement on illegal websites. The Digital Citizens Alliance estimates that piracy websites generated approximately $227million in 2013 from advertising. CLP is now looking at those lawyers in Orlando industry to help them fight back.

The CLP’s police intellectual property crime unit (PIPCU) launched ‘Operation Creative’ to partner with creative brands and industry players to crack down on websites that host unauthorised copyright content and to disrupt revenue streams to illegal sites from online advertising. PIPCU had in pilot projects identified advertising as a key component in the generation of criminal profits for websites providing access to infringing content. As a result, they now publish and maintain a list of Infringing Websites (IWL), the first such list of its kind globally to be developed and maintained for law enforcement purposes and with industry involvement.

IWL is actually updated with input from the industry, agencies and intermediaries who can identify and report potential infringers. Their input is then vetted by PIPCU and, if confirmed, the website is added to the list.

Detective Chief Inspector Andy Fyfe, head of PIPCU, said: “If an advert from an established brand appears on an infringing website, not only does it lend the site a look of legitimacy, but inadvertently the brand and advertiser are funding online crime. IWL serves as a safety tool, ensuring the reputation of advertisers and brands are not discredited through association with illegal websites.”

In effect, this means IWL is updated and used within the industry and law enforcement as a ‘blacklist’ for advertisement placement in future. Potentially, this new tool could also be used as a reference point in commercial agreements and contracts between advertising agencies and their clients in terms of blacklisting. However, those agreements should also deal with the consequences of misplacement, tolerance margins and takedown policies at the beginning of that contractual relationship. A development of contractual obligations to include blacklist sites, such as those identified on IWL from time to time could be useful and might help this cooperation between law enforcement and industry. However, there are limits in a global context and that is perhaps where technology and self-regulation can step in to help.

By its nature, digital media crosses traditional geographic and jurisdictional boundaries and thereby creates new challenges. The legal variables between jurisdictions even within Europe can be striking. This makes it almost impossible to have a uniform approach which applies by way of law. The internet is also an area that is incredibly difficult to police and questions remain unresolved around who should take responsibility for assisting in that task. The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) has mirrored calls of the PIPCU as regards online advertising and is actively encouraging its members and the industry to develop self-regulation and collaborate on safeguards to prevent or reduce advertisement misplacement, again in areas which promote or facilitate illegal activity or next to inappropriate content which can harm brand reputation.

Most industry players are happy to work with law enforcement to crack down on illegal activity. However, opinions diverge when you mention brand safety, which can be more subjective and arguably best left to the advertisers/brands concerned.

Duncan Trigg, CEO of Project Sunblock Limited which has developed technology focused on brand protection, said: “Brand safety means different things to different brands. For all, financial supporting and ultimately the legitimisation of illegal sites with any recognisable brand is a definitive no. However, elements of what is commonly referred to as inappropriate content should really be down to the individual advertiser to decide upon. In commercial terms, some of the most harmful content can be in disaster management.

“For example, an airline will not wish to appear advertising in the digital press against a travel disaster. True brand safety should give advertisers choice and capability to block exactly what content they feel is harmful to their own brand equity in real time at individual page level. With technology such as ours, there is no need to sacrifice the substantial benefits of audience and behavioural targeting that the real time bidding market place offers in order to minimise the risk of negative PR that misplacement can and does generate.”

Technology may well hold the key to any solution to these issues. The calls from the ICC and PIPCU for industry involvement and self-regulation to fill gaps that that the law cannot are sensible in this context. However, there needs to be meaningful self-regulation with consequences for any real value to be added. These new relationships and self-regulatory environments are still evolving. Technology sits somewhere in between, both creating and bridging gaps between industry, law enforcement and the future.

Mary Shields – of Faegre Baker Daniels LLP – is a corporate advisor to online businesses and SMEs on e-commerce and cross-border aspects of digital trade.

Jon Wellings says we should rethink physical marketing in a digital universe.

When it comes to point of sale (POS) material, there has never been a level playing field. Big brands with their own stores have absolute control over every element of the process. When they design an innovative and compelling display for their products, it will be deployed exactly as the creative intended.

However, for most brands, it is not so straightforward, as only the minority have any certainty about the end environment where their product will be displayed. They can design the most imaginative POS material, but there is no guarantee it will even make it out of the box in some locations.

To make matters worse, the bigger the campaign and budget, the more challenging the issue. When scale is introduced, at a continental or even global level, it becomes even harder to predict how different store environments can accommodate POS material. Anecdotally, POS wastage stands as high as 80% for some brands.

The advent of changing and increasing channels could mark a fundamental shift in how brands think about POS and can make their spend work harder. After all, the POS is where the transaction happens and that is no longer just physically in a store. Online retail means that the POS could feasibly be anywhere on the customer journey, particularly when it comes to mobile purchases. This liberates brands from a uniform and restricted campaign, allowing them total control and predictability over the sales environment. Previously, all brands without a retail footprint could do was attempt to raise awareness outside of the store as much as possible and hope that the POS was deployed as intended.

Not all stumbling blocks are magically vanished with the introduction of digital sales channels however. Multi-regional strategies have been difficult to implement owing to local differences and variations. This has been particularly problematic for physical POS because of the significant differences and sheer unpredictability of instore environments. A campaign deployed digitally is working in an environment of known quantities. They do not have to worry about the whims of store managers in creating a beautiful display for their product, because a digital POS can be controlled centrally.

However, this still does not give brands carte blanche to develop a one size fits all campaign. Local differences and variations go beyond solely the instore environment. They need to take into account linguistic disparities, the needs and preferences of local consumers, and cultural sensitivities which may render the humour or tone of a campaign inappropriate. This is alongside the more basic elements of thinking about how ads or sites will appear on different devices, and which are most prevalent in the locality where the product is being marketed.

This is all well and good for brands which are marketing ‘destination products’ – those items which merit a particular journey or those that customers would specifically browse online for, such as jeans or cosmetics. However, online sales channels are of little use to FMCG products which are incidental to a shopping visit. Only so much can be achieved using external brand awareness – instore standout is key, and this is where the lack of physical POS can be limiting. Online shopping does not necessarily solve the problem either, as a functional product will struggle to get noticed.

This is where new means of engaging customers can pay dividends and the explosion of digital channels comes into its own. These are principally using personalised communication and technology to bring a new dimension into stores – reducing reliance on physical POS to achieve standout.

Brands without their own retail footprint have no guarantee that a POS will be constructed and displayed for their product, even if supplied. But they could print a Quick Response (QR) code on the product itself, which customers can scan with their smartphone to receive a personalised offer or price. Equally, brands could develop their own apps that can be used to scan certain products, which then text discount coupons that the customer can use at the till. This is something companies can fully control and tailor to different localities, which also rewards loyalty and generates interaction with the brand.

This technology is readily accessible and for larger stores, already a reality in some venues. Earlier this year, iBeacon technology was unveiled which will allow retailers to use Bluetooth to broadcast notifications (special offers for example) to smartphone users through dedicated apps. While QR codes may be a little clunky, app technology has been widely used and adopted, and could represent a tipping point for instore marketing of products. Used wisely, it may one day even prove to be more effective in winning the standout war than physical POS.

However, that being said, companies are still reliant on the store owner implementing this technology. In time, stores may come to charge brands for the increased penetration and data they receive from this cutting edge technology.

Jon Wellings is head of managed services at Communisis.