Mobile Fix: content, retail, Twitter and mobile money
Get your dose of everything mobile with a Friday fix from Addictive!’s Simon Andrews as he rounds up another hectic week.
Just as mobile and social are essentially inseparable in modern marketing, content is increasingly key, too. And as it gets adopted by brands (Adage say it was 12% of US marketers budget last year) their myriad of agency partners all jump up claiming they are the natural home for content.
“It’s a new space, and it’s clear that everyone is trying to get a piece of it,” said Shane Snow, chief creative officer at Contently, a technology company that offers publishing tools for brands, as well as a database of vetted journalists. “Everyone is coming up with a reason why their business model makes sense and why they’re the most appropriate way for a brand to tell their story.”
Many of the players make their case in this article and there is a focus on my old colleagues at GroupM, who have been doing this longer than most.
But whilst video is the usual output of a content strategy this piece points out that digging deeper can be beneficial:
“I can also imagine the head of content at P&G looking through the company’s patents and finding the original formula for Tide and then somehow turning it into a science experiment/contest in high school classes across America. That would certainly enhance Tide’s reputation as innovative and customer focused.”
But too often content projects never reach significant scale and hence ROI can be an issue. Having a distribution strategy for the content is now key – and that may shape the market in the future.
But when you look to blend distribution skills with content creation you can run into issues. The success of GroupM is causing some concern in the UK with Richard Desmond voicing his worry that GroupM is too powerful – backed up by some of the independent producers who actually make the content. Sorrell has been quick to say that different parts of the WPP empire don’t exploit their position to get deals done.
The key issue in the whole debate is who is investing the money and taking the risk – and who gets the reward. In some cases it is brands who are funding the content and taking the risk, in others it is the agencies (like GroupM) who are spending their own money to develop IP they can then offer to clients.
This is the approach we are increasingly taking and it makes more sense that exclusively developing content, services and ideas for clients in return for time and team based fees. You just have to be really clear about what you are doing.
Sorrell gets to the heart of this debate with an article on LinkedIn pointing out how creativity is different in modern marketing:
“What we sell are pearls. Whether we are designers or planners or writers or art directors or corporate strategists, our raw material is knowledge. We turn that knowledge into ideas, insights, and objects that have a material, quantifiable value to our clients.
“They are all pearls: of wisdom, of beauty, of desire, of wonder. Only the human mind can perform this extraordinary alchemy. And only certain kinds of mind, at that.
“But here we must be very careful. We have come to believe that only very few are alchemists – and I think that’s wrong and dangerous.”
He doesn’t get into how you get rewarded for these pearls, but when a time and team fee structure pays pretty much the same for pigs ears as it does for pearls it’s no surprise people are looking for other models.
And we think brands are open to new thinking, as they get evidence that content and social can work at scale. Cadbury claim their blend of Facebook and TV was hugely effective for Cream Eggs last year – but the way they got there was different;
“We launched the trial to find a new approach to our media mix that was going to reach 18 to 24 year-olds. We used a Facebook process called the Publishing Garage where we got all our agencies together to establish our content pillars.”
As brands adopt modern marketing – with mobile, social and content at the core – we are convinced they will embrace new types of partnerships and new models of investment. Our ambition is to share in the success of our work – and to be paid for being clever. Or not.
Retail – Mobile and Real world
No industry or sector is feeling the effects of tech more than retail. As consumers use tech as tools to make their lives easier, the idea of showrooming just makes sense. And with the ability to check reviews, pricing and delivery options in the pockets of most shoppers the gap between online and offline is shrinking.
These are great examples of some of the ways retailers are using mobile; we have been talking about the Neiman Marcus for the last year. Their insight – that if a customers talks with a staff member regularly they are much more likely to buy – means customers can see if Brandon Studebaker is working today and make contact.
Closing the delivery gap is the next major change and the news that eBay have partnered with Argos to offer a high street collect service is no surprise. Here the insight is that 3 out of 10 people (House of Fraser stats we think) collecting an item will buy something else when in the store. So the additional store traffic is really valuable to Argos. We expect the next step to be around returns – the part of ecommerce that separates the men from the boys. ASOS and Amazon have a really efficient high street return service using the 25,000 Paypoint stores around the UK.
How long before a big high street name agrees to this sort of service? Which store on Oxford Street would turn down the chance to have dozens of people a day come into their store to return their parcels?
The Amazon high street play is around lockers – but they are running into some issues in the US with retailers like Staples and RadioShack pulling out of the programme. The model works for some retailers and not for others.
If one dimension is convenience of delivery, the other is speed of delivery and Amazon are very focused here. In the UK they have announced 3 more distribution centres and in the US they are moving really fast too, with 50 new centres opened since 2010. The opportunity is huge;
If Amazon can place fulfilment centres nearer to the top 20 U.S. metropolitan areas, the company could reach 50 percent of the U.S. population with same-day delivery, compared with 15 percent now, according to supply chain consultants MWPVL International. That would require only opening another 12 warehouses beyond those built and announced, the firm said.
Talking about this topic (and Googles ambitions in same day delivery) back in March we mentioned Kozmo as the dotcom boom pioneer that proved same delivery is a tough business to make money in and we speculated that their idea might now work. We’ll soon know as they have announced a comeback.
A lot of brands reading this may think it’s not anything that concerns them. But new research from one of the smarter US banks suggest that this trend has implications for FMCG brands. Already Amazon sell a lot of FMCG product – often placed with Amazon by third parties or wholesalers rather than the brand owner – and this will definitely grow as they ramp up grocery home deliveries. Even now their subscribe and save service is affecting the market – the best seller in toilet tissue is a 45 roll pack of Andrex.
If you are a prime customer it makes perfect sense and we get all the dull stuff for the office this way. The US research points out that the best selling brands on Amazon can be very different to those in supermarkets.
Are your brands sold on Amazon? By you? And how are you supporting this sales channel?
An increasing amount of our work is helping brands understand GAFA, Vertical Stacks and what tech could mean for their business. There is so much opportunity across Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon for nearly every business – but often their only real connection with GAFA is that their media agency make some media buys.
If a GAFA audit of your business sounds interesting, let us know. And if you want some assistance around the retail landscape – especially with the huge opportunity for beacons – we are well positioned to help.
If you want to see what modern marketing means for a retailer you could do worse than look at B&Q – lots of smart thinking going on.