Walmart is now helping its brand product providers do just that, using attribution technology to connect consumer purchase outcomes back to ad exposure.
But, in this video interview with Beet.TV, Aaron Bernstein, senior director of insights and advocacy at Walmart, explains why he wants to go deeper than that.
“Walmart is in a unique position when it comes to media measurement because of our first-party data and the ability to sort of assign true attribution back to media exposure,” Bernstein says.
“The ability to sync up a set-top box (ad exposure) to a (consequential customer) transaction is really powerful. We’re starting to be able to answer that question around true linear TV attribution.”
But Bernstein thinks he can do better. “It’s not just measurement at a sales transaction level,” he says. “It’s also measurement from a brand equity perspective.”
He says the company has the means to use attribution technology to answer different kinds of questions – not only “Did an ad drive a purchase?” but also “Are customers feeling more favourable? Are they feeling that Walmart’s a better corporate citizen or a more valuable member of society or a stronger contributor to their local community?”
Retailers Are The Ad Platforms Of The Future: Profitero’s Wiener
Walmart is the largest US retailer, and also happens to boast 150 million weekly online shoppers.
Over the last year or two, Target, Walmart and CVS have all launched their own media networks.
Walmart’s Walmart Connect division, formerly Walmart Media, allows brands to reach those consumers with omni-channel strategies.
In February, the unit announced a self-service ad-buying capability would launch later this year.
It also announced the acquisition of the IP and technology behind Thunder, a creative automation ad-tech company, with plans to integrate the tech into its self-serve platform, to help brands automate their creative.
Marketers To Benefit From Big Retailers’ Data Chops: Furious’ Swartz
For Bernstein, the key imperative is to stay ahead of the game.
“I think there’s there’s industries that are rapidly innovating and maybe even innovating faster than retail to some extent,” he says.
“But how do you find those applications and sort of bring them back into your own kind of environment and ecosystem?
“(That) is something that we sort of strive to do – understanding the world, understanding the zeitgeists, what’s culturally, politically, socially, economically.”
You are watching “Seeing Around Corners: Media Decisions During a Period of Disruption,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Standard Media Index. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>According to Vudu vp Scott Blanksteen, it’s what brings “power to the platform.” Shopper marketing data from Walmart – which includes customer purchasing and behavior data around habits like who buys Coke and who shops for a certain brand of razor – is layered on top of Vudu’s other data practices, including content targeting by demographic and integrations with third-party data providers to create audience segments.
Vudu launched as a transactional service offering a library of approximately 180,000 TV and movie titles available to rent or purchase. It introduced a free-with-ads streaming service two years ago, a platform that currently houses around 10,000 titles.
“Ad-supported content on OTT is TV done better. It’s better for advertisers and brands because they can do a much better job reaching the audience they want, with messages that are appropriate for customers,” says Blanksteen, speaking with BeetTV during Advertising Week. “We can help advertisers reach the right customers and help customers see ads that aren’t completely pointless to them.”
Better ad experiences, Blanksteen believes, mean that viewers won’t go to great lengths to actively avoid ads. Vudu sells standard ad units in 15-, 30- and 60-second lengths and keeps the ad load light, running six to eight minute ad blocks per hour, “to ensure engagement and responsiveness,” he says.
Surviving the streaming wars
Blanksteen acknowledges that competition among streaming platforms is coming to a head, an indication that Walmart and Vudu are “heading in the right direction.” He sees Vudu’s positioning as an advantage – it offers a combination of original content, new releases and free streaming – as well as its dedication to building out a great customer experience, something that comes into play when customers can watch the same content across multiple platforms.
One area Vudu has built out an enhanced customer experience is in family programming. The company has launched several tools for parents and kids, including a partnership with Common Sense Media to make more informed family-friendly recommendations, a kids’ content platform within the app, and a playback feature that can automatically fast forward through sensitive content when selected.
Ultimately, Blanksteen believes differentiation for Vudu boils down to its selection of services.
“What we’re hearing from customers [is that] there’s getting to be a bit of subscription fatigue. We don’t believe customers should subscribe to 10 different services. We want to give people a choice,” he says.
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.
]]>Whereas shoppers’ in-store experiences might once have involved interacting with a cashier or other employee, now they’re researching and buying products online, engaging in customer service follow-up and making a lot more returns, Rogers explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing conference.
“All of that has really changed the nature of the relationship with the customer and now what we have historically defined as marketing or the communication piece is really a small piece of the overall pie now,” says Rogers, who had been Chief Marketing Officer at Walmart. “Structurally, what we’ve done is we’ve made the job of the chief marketer bigger. And so now it’s chief member officer instead of chief marketing officer. Every customer touchpoint digitally and physically along the way now resides within the marketing team, and that’s a big change.”
Rogers is one of many marketers who are involved with the ANA’s CMO Council along with the Cannes advertising festival. He likes the opportunities to brainstorm, think and ideate with other marketers who are experiencing similar challenges.
“The challenge is when you’re in your own organization, everybody kind of already expects you to know all this stuff. So it’s cool to have a safe place where you can go and network and think and be around a bunch of smart people to cultivate ideas that you can then bring back to your company. This group has a high ROI in terms of the things that I’m able to take from it and bring back to my company.” Rogers adds.
When the CMO Council convenes again at Cannes in June of 2019, Rogers hopes to see guidelines or recommendations “about what companies can do in terms of their org structure, to position themselves to really go and address customer experience broadly.” He thinks it’s a “good idea for this group to provide guidance to corporate America on how to do that.”
This segment is from CMO Growth Council presented by the ANA and Cannes Lions. Beet.TV coverage is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>With a successful 13-year career at Walmart and having spent eight years on the board of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, Ramos had decided it was time for a change.
“What I did was great in the business sector, but then I think that as a Puerto Rican myself I have to make sure that I leave a legacy and that I work to make a difference,” says Ramos, who was a featured guest at the recent Beet Retreat in the City. In this interview with Phil Cowdell, Global President, Client Services at GroupM, Ramos explains how the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico—which is affiliated with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and has just celebrated its 50th year—had decided to shift its focus in the face of an economic crisis that has lasted for more than a decade.
Several years before Hurricane Maria, “We decided that we needed to do things differently. In order to prepare our kids and youth to be prepared for what the future has in store for them.”
At one of its 13 club houses, the organization set about trying to change “the systemic conditions in which our kids live” by concentrating on training them to benefit from tourism. From ages six to 12, youths began to learn about the tourism culture. “When they’re teens, we work with them on entreprenuership. We start putting that seed in their minds that there are things you can think through, there are things that you can come up with. You can have your own business or you can work through another business,” says Ramos.
Part of the effort involved training parents and guardians as well. “It’s about home stability and changing the conditions for the kids. The kids do not choose to live poor or to be born poor,” she adds.
This is different than in the U.S., where the focus is mainly in children, notes Cowdell, who along with many other GroupM representatives became active in Puerto Rico relief efforts immediately after Hurricane Maria struck. However, in Puerto Rico, “You can’t just help the child, you have to help the parent as well,” he says.
Among the success stories at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, one in particular stands out to Cowdell and Ramos, who had mentored a young girl in her high school years and was determined to help her succeed through college and beyond. “We had to involve her mother because it was a single mother trying to let her only girl go out and study,” Ramos recalls. The girl had posted grades of 4.0 in both high school and college, where she studied chemical engineering and won summer internships to Harvard, Georgetown and Ohio State University.
She eventually made her way to NASA with assistance from the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico.
“Everyone has human potential,” says Cowdell. Then he asks Ramos about the future.
“I think there’s hope,” she says. “Puerto Ricans are resilient.”
At a reception following Beet Retreat in the City, there was an auction to assist the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico. So far, that effort has raised more than $20,000.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat in City & Town Hall on June 6, 2018 in New York City. The event and video series are presented by LiveRamp, TiVo, true[X] and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“Brands belong to society and are part of society,” Julian Porras says following the launch of STAND WITH PUERTO RICO, an new initiative to generate awareness and provide support to storm victims.
“The first priority always is to make sure that our people are doing okay and their families are doing okay,” Porras says of the disasters’ aftermath in this interview with Beet.TV. “Our clients and other partners of the community and industry. Luckily no one was harmed, but certainly the impact of those natural disasters have slowed down business.”
In Puerto Rico, six weeks after Hurricane Maria, “it’s just simply been a hardship not only for business but just day to day getting to your routine, getting to your family, getting to your friends. It’s just been tough going.”
Asked what the advertising and media community and its clients should be doing to help storm victims, Porras cites creating awareness and helping to keep the devastating living conditions in Puerto Rico front and center.
“In the news cycle that we live in, news comes and goes very fast and we forget about things. We want to make sure that folks are aware of what’s happening and how the industry can contribute both on the media side, on the agency side and on the client side.”
Launched at this week’s Festival of Media/LATAM conference, STAND WITH PUERTO RICO is joint effort by Omnicom Media Group and Beet.TV, with AT&T AdWorks and Teads as Founding Sponsors. Its goals are:
• Brief the industry on the immediate and long-term needs of the island
• Match media, creative agencies and marketers with NGOs
• Brainstorm creative solutions using technology, social media and traditional media
• Enlist volunteers to accompany relief groups to Puerto Rico
• Build key partnerships to make this effort ongoing
“It’s not something that’s kind of the flavor of the month,” Porras says of brand marketers stepping up to help provide humanitarian aid. “It’s what companies stand for and they simply just go ahead and do it. They do the right thing for the community, for their employees and for the markets and communities where they make business.”
Stand With Puerto, The Industry Steps Up
Performance marketing technology provider Criteo, perhaps best known for its online consumer retargeting expertise, is leveraging its learning loop capabilities to assist not only brands but retailers and others as ecommerce grows ever-more competitive.
There will nearly two-dozen sessions devoted to the present and future of e-commerce marketing at the DMEXCO 2017 advertising and media trade show in Cologne, Germany on Sept. 13 and 14.
With the combined forces of Criteo and HookLogic, the latter acquired by Criteo in the past year, the company offers a performance model that has the ability to learn from what sells, Jonathan Opdyke, Criteo’s President of Brand Solutions, explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“It’s one thing to just target a high-intending audience,” says Opdyke. “It’s another to be able to target that audience and actually understand which parts of it end up buying. And then use that to learn and buy the next part of the audience and know exactly how to buy in order to generate a sale.”
He cites as one example Hasbro, whose products are sold by a gamut of retailers, from Toys “R” US to Kohl’s, Target and Walmart. This makes it complicated for the toy marketer to figure exactly where and how to promote itself.
“They don’t have a single point of sale. They have many points of sale. So you have to treat that as basically one big giant ecommerce site that now Hasbro is promoting online,” Opdyke adds.
Criteo helps Hasbro and others by creating a learning model to drive sales based on picking the right media. The company’s new Commerce Marketing Ecosystem is designed to encourage retailers retailers, publishers and brands to pool their data in the hopes of getting new and existing customers to purchase their products outside the Amazon ecosystem, as The Wall Street Journal reports.
With Criteo Sponsored Products, an offering akin to Amazon Sponsored Products, the company offers brands native product ads that appear throughout the purchase path of retailer sites and apps. Shoppers who click on the ads stay within a participating retailer’s ecommerce environment to convert, while brands pay for each click.
Additionally, Criteo is working on a new format called Brand Spotlight, which Opdke describes as a new kind of brand placement built into retail websites.
Instead of a product-level auction, “It’s more of a brand-level auction for competition for a featured placement within the retailer,” says Opdyke. Designed as a value-add for brands and retailers, Brand Spotlight is done on a programmatic (as opposed to CPM-display type unit) pay-for-click auction approach “with full attribution.”
“Welcome to the Vibrant Future,” a video series of thought leadership from DMEXCO 2017 presented by Criteo. For more videos please visit this page.
]]>So when an Alphonso SDK in a tablet, smartphone, smart set-top box or TV set recognizes what’s being watched, an ad can be served in real time, the company’s Chief Revenue Officer, Mark Gall, explained during a panel discussion about the state of advanced TV sponsored by the MEC agency at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
“Now we’re able to target one-to-one on a deterministic manner from TV to mobile but also, and even more importantly, show ROI,” said Gall.
Alphonso’s technology is present in more than 45 million devices in 32 million U.S. TV households, representing about one in three of the latter. It identifies TV shows and commercials and “fingerprints” them. The company plans to make its presence known in the U.K. in the fourth quarter of 2017.
“Most people are using a second screen while watching TV,” Gall said in responsive to a question from moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink. “We are now solving the problem of connecting TV to mobile.”
In addition to being able to extend frequency and build reach in real time, advertisers can use Alphonso’s technology to attribute ad exposure to sales and traffic to online sites and auto dealerships, among other things.
“At the end of the day, we’re able to prove the ad was recognized and watched and you bought something,” Gall said.
If someone is watching a commercial on TV for, say, Walmart, a Walmart ad can be served to that person’s device. Contrarily, a competitor could have a conquest ad served. With paid streaming, someone watching Game of Thrones might be avoiding ads during that programming but they can be served ads via Alphonso.
Gall referenced a project his company is doing with an unidentified retailer in which the retailer’s CRM data is matched with Alphonso’s TV viewing database. This way the retailer can focus its resources on reaching its most valuable shoppers.
“Now you can focus in on the seven or eight networks, or the two or three paid streaming shows that they watched, and target them. And don’t worry about the shopper who’s only spending $20 a year. Worry about the ones that are spending $600 a year,” said Gall.
For a glimpse of Alphonso’s database of TV commercials, visit this page.
This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Within the digital domain, everything is census-level data. “We have event-level data, cookie data, all those things, and they are pinned to individual profiles,” says Gotlieb.
Today, a single Nielsen respondent is representative “of circa 50,000 people in the population of the United States,” Gotlieb continues. “You can’t do attribution on that basis. It’s not granular enough.”
With truly census level data on TV, marketers can “do the kind of analytics to join the dots between what’s accomplished by digital media and legacy media and create the complete story,” says Gotlieb. “If you’re talking about census-level data as it relates to television, that’s comScore today, once it gets all the set-top box data rolled up is all you need.”
The same thing is needed on the sales side, according to Gotlieb, “whether it’s Kroger’s data or Walmart’s data or Nielsen Catalina, all those data sets are census level data.”
Aggregating all of the data provides insights into “what is an individual view on TV, what do they buy, where do they surf, what do they search, what are their social behaviors, etc.,” Gotlieb explains. “And you begin to understand what’s relevant to that individual, what moves them to buy a product and how effective your marketing is.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.
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