WHY OMNICHANNEL IS THE FUTURE OF RETAIL FOR MILLENNIALS (AND EVERYONE ELSE, TOO)

Article from Ad Age Publishing partner Neustar

By Marc Vermut

One size doesn't fit all, and that's a good thing

The modern consumer is no longer a single-channel shopper. A recent study of a major U.S. retailer’s customers found that 73 percent followed an omnichannel purchase journey, compared with just 7 percent who were purely digital. What’s more, fluidity between channels is increasing, which allows retail brands to shape shoppers’ experiences and ultimately build a competitive advantage founded on omnichannel customer intelligence.

The imperative for marketers, therefore, is to devise an omnichannel strategy that connects with core customers as they move between retail channels and touchpoints. Yet most retailers don’t outperform across audience development, measurement and activation plans, the combination of which is the key to success. It’s not simple to accomplish. So start by building support and commitment within your organization to begin this journey toward marketing excellence.

The best place to start: millennials. No consumer segment commands more attention than millennials, who comprise 75 million U.S. customers with close to $600 billion in spending power. Despite cries announcing the end of traditional retail, millennials spend a greater share of wallet at department stores than the U.S. population overall; 50 percent of the demographic prefer brick-and-mortar shopping over e-commerce; and 56 percent shop in-store at least once a week. But they are not just walking into the store blind. They’re actually visiting retail locations as part of a truly multichannel shopping experience: 67 percent of millennials buy in-store after doing online research first.

For example, consider Ashley, a 25-year-old who pulls out her smartphone and launches the app for her favorite cosmetics brand while waiting for a friend. Thanks to AI technology, Ashley is directed to products that match her skin tone and align with her browsing history and previous in-store purchases. Later that day, she passes the brand’s store and swings by on her way back from lunch to pick up the suggested products. Mission accomplished. The best-in-class retailers have been implementing a successful omnichannel strategy to support this for a while now. What does it take to devise your own strategy so your customer doesn’t become your competitor’s?

Customer intelligence: Know your millennial consumer

Identifying the millennial consumer is a complex endeavor, and once you accomplish this task, the hoops you’ll have to jump through to become better omnichannel marketers will be just as difficult—but the rewards will be well worth the effort.

Appealing to millennials in general is a challenge. There’s not one characteristic representative of the entire demographic. Millennial is just a macro term of a set of age groups and (partially true) stereotypes. There’s no one way to slice it—segmenting in the aggregate isn’t a means to success. It’s expensive, inefficient and limits your marketing options by tying up large portions of your marketing investments. Beyond age and gender, it’s understanding income, interest, and affinity, too. Not every millennial wants to travel the world. They each have different levels of disposable income and different shopping experiences.

Another challenge for brands in an omnichannel environment is consistently and persistently identifying the actual customer at any point on their path to purchase. There are the customers you can’t see, from in-store shoppers who don’t participate in loyalty programs to customers who never log in. Plus, the anonymity of digital shopping can lead to inexact or inaccurate data: Are those dozens of site visits via the same Wi-Fi just one visitor returning multiple times—or many visitors sharing an internet connection in a coffee shop? If a cookie records activity across multiple websites, is that one person’s browser behavior—or the interactions of multiple family members who share a laptop?

Shared identifiers among millennials is a particularly common problem: There's a good chance that the shopper you think is logging into your site is actually someone else: 21 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have been found to share streaming-video passwords with people who don't live with them, for example. And depending on the data, it could be hard to differentiate the millennial customer from the baby boomer parent, considering that 15 percent of 25- to 35-year-olds are reportedly living with their parents.

The path to solving both of these problems is identity resolution: the science of connecting customers' many identifiers across channels (like email addresses, cookies, phone numbers, mobile device ad IDs and home addresses) into a single customer profile. Also important to note is that 60 percent of identity data is outdated within two years, so keeping regular tabs on your customers in those data lakes you've been building—centralized repositories for large amounts of information—is an essential part of ensuring the identifiers you use to track your customers are accurate and up to date.

In order to keep up foot traffic—and engage millennial consumers—retailers must adapt to the ever-changing paths to purchase with the ability to engage throughout the customer journey. You really need to look at your customers and work with identity and customer-intelligence partners who can expand the picture with second- and third-party data to learn about them on an individual level. Think granularly: where they’re shopping, what their interests are, what they respond to and where they’re consuming media—which is how the cosmetics brand captured Ashley’s attention, pointing her to specific products.

Marketers should also encourage partners to adopt organizational strategies to improve data collection: A recent study finds that brands with “clearly defined roles and governance for managing consumer data and relations [had] increased more than 10 percent over the past fiscal year.” Williams-Sonoma, which has had a head start of more than 20 years in omnichannel, incentivizes cross-channel cooperation and data capture by rewarding in-store employees for initiating online sales.

Customer experience: Activate and captivate

Research has shown the more personalized the experience, the more engaged the millennial shopper will be. It's the desire for custom experiences that drives millennials toward everything from craft marketplaces like Etsy to artisanal breweries. It's also undoubtedly one reason why 28 percent of millennials find personalized digital offers—based on their past purchase history—to be appealing. Even American shopping malls are getting in on the act: Instead of shutting down, some shopping centers like the updated Westfield Century City Mall in Los Angeles are converting into different types of spaces with a focus on environment and fluidity.

Strategically anticipating the wide variety of omnichannel opportunities brands can seize gives them greater control over the outcome. For example, you could use address updates to know the moment a customer has moved to a new home, and then send a “welcome gift” to the customer’s new house, such as a new home furnishings catalog complete with coupons for her favorite products at the nearby store branch. Or you could follow up a browsing session online with a postcard or catalog relevant to that consumer’s expressed interest and intent. By phone number alone, you can recognize a valued customer who calls in to your company support line and automatically route that customer past the automated voice system—putting her in touch with a live operator who is waiting with loyalty and purchase information in hand.

For the 38 percent of millennial cosmetics shoppers who turn to friends for beauty inspiration, the path to purchase may have been different than that of Ashley, our cosmetics shopper, who shopped while waiting for a friend. They may have posted their augmented-makeup selfies to Facebook (accompanied by a poll), or messaged the picture to a few close associates to gather opinions before purchasing a new look. Ashley bought the makeup recommended on the mobile app, without much friction from consideration to sale.

From the brand’s perspective, this omnichannel engagement was a success. But what if her friend had arrived on time—would Ashley have even started her purchase path? A smart, omnichannel-minded brand has mere moments to get the attention of their on-the-go consumers whose attention may be fleeting and short, as we have seen with Ashley.

Customer analytics: Know what works (and what doesn’t)

By capturing the types of behaviors and characteristics of the real people driving your e-commerce and in-store sales, you’ll gain valuable insights to use as the basis for modeling vastly more accurate customer segments. That is the foundation that enables you to build far more impactful customer journeys for those segments than any broad, “spray-and-pray” demographic targeting can provide.

In order to surface, socialize and act upon these insights, implement a unified measurement platform that considers all factors that impact customers making purchases beyond simply the marketing you can observe at an individual level. This includes the economy, seasonality, competitor activities and non-addressable media including TV and radio. With your strong customer intelligence capabilities in place, you will also understand the consumer who became your customer, enabling you to capture her underlying likelihood to make a purchase. Ignoring this propensity will result in incorrect measurement. Having more detailed data about individual consumers will allow you to refine your marketing, your messaging, the customer experience you provide and the segments you engage with.

But regardless of how up to date your data is, you still need to recognize and analyze the differing paths to purchase within your omnichannel retail strategy—and continually refine them, too, by translating the collected mountains of data on your shoppers into tangible experiences. And to effectively accomplish this without tying your teams in Gordian knots, you have to aim for the complex, not the complicated. For example, Neustar tends to recommend that brands build anywhere from three to eight strategic audiences around which to plan and measure their marketing. Within any given campaign, you may refine those audiences to target just a subset. It’s more effective to execute at the granular audience level with highly targeted messages and promotions, but always consider the trade-offs between the level of effort and resources required and the incremental benefit of a surfeit of defined micro-audiences, thereby missing the forest.

Retailers that take these methodical steps to capture, compile, refine, update and analyze data about their customers and prospects are able to microtarget crucial millennial shoppers through an omnichannel approach. The clear benefit is increased sales and customer acquisition, building a crucial competitive advantage, today and into the future. On the other hand, if your audience development, measurement and activation plans are not linked to your decision-making, confusion can result for your customers and your marketing teams and negative consequences to your marketing ROI. Putting in the hard work up front should relieve customer frictions and lead to happier customers spending more money with you more frequently. A clear win.

About CoreMedia Systems

CoreMedia has the tools you need to buy TV, radio and print. Our software solutions can help you Buy, Manage, Analyze and Optimize your media spend. Request a Demo or call one of our direct response media specialists today at 973.276.0882.

by Jay Stack

Omnicom Media Group First To Test OpenAP’s New TV Ad Data

Article from Beet.TV

It originally launched with more modest ambitions, to harmonize the data segments TV networks use to describe their audiences. But now OpenAP has launched the latest new initiative in its ongoing maturation – a supply-side platform (SSP) to help the buying of linear TV ad inventory. The new platform, announced on Monday, has connective tissue that exposes OpenAP systems via APIs to buyers’ own systems.

First to use it is Omnicom Media Group (OMG), which has connected its Omni buying platform to OpenAP’s tools and will be testing them through Q1 and Q2.

OMG OpenAP’s API

In this video interview with Beet.TV in December, which we are republishing today, OMG’s advanced advertising MD Matthew Kramer talked about a dearth of data he said was available with which to prove the effectiveness of addressable TV ads.

In today’s announcement, Kramer says: “Connecting Omni to OpenAPmarks a significant step towards automation of traditional TV by bringing more speed, efficiency and visibility to TV inventory, enabling more flexibility and accountability in this medium.”

Making availability clearer

OpenAP’s system will let ad buyers like those at OMG log in to their existing buy-side tools to get lists of buyable inventory across networks including:

• AMC Networks
• Fox Corporation
• NBCUniversal
• Univision
• ViacomCBS

Soon added to that mix will be:

• A+E Networks
• The Weather Channel

The system makes the forecasted reach and frequency of ads visible. When buy requests are sent to the networks, they confirm orders and provide final media plans, according to OpenAP’s announcement.

Altogether, it aims to align with buyers’ existing workflows, and provide some additional automation to boot.

But, in TV, automation is not total. As Wall Street Journal reports:”An order doesn’t necessarily reserve the inventory. The TV seller is expected to respond to a buyer within 24 hours to confirm the order…

“Once ad buyers select and reserve inventory provided through the SSP, they will still need to work with the individual sellers and use traditional insertion orders to complete transactions.”

Piecing data together

“(We will be) working with the partners and the sellers to make sure that there’s ways for us to get the information we need from them,” OMG’s Kramer told Beet.TV in December, “to at least incorporate that black box into our overall reach frequencies and then eventually things like MTA (multi-touch attribution) and attribution analysis is really key.

“We’re triangulating data that we’re getting from the SSPs, that we’re getting from the publishers themselves, and that we’re getting from guys like Nielsen.

“But not everybody has the entire ecosystem and so we’re really going to have to work and continue to work through the rest of this year and into 2021.”

Indeed, in its announcement, OpenAP says: “The launch delivers on requests from advertisers for more transparency and visibility of the TV marketplace and maximizes investments buyers and sellers have made in data and technology by enabling more sophisticated buying of advanced TV across premium viewing environments.”

OpenAP’s development

After several years of dismay at the fragmented, difficult-to-measure nature of connected and addressable TV, efforts to streamline the opportunity are now coming thick and fast.

For its part, OpenAP advanced its maturation more than a year ago when it stated its desire to launch software that would transform it into a “marketplace” for more easily buying targeted, automated TV ads across multiple major linear networks.

The latest move, however, is more modestly focused on bringing data to bear on enhancing the traditional TV ad-buying process.

Interviewed by WSJ, OpenAP CEO David Levy says: “There’s already a baked-in market for commitments between agencies and publishers.” He says he wants to “optimize the spend that already exists”.

About CoreMedia Systems

CoreMedia Systems, Inc., develops and supports CoreDirect, the industry’s most widely used performance media management software. The system is used by more than 130 direct response agencies and marketers to plan, buy, manage, measure and optimize performance-based media campaigns. For more information visit www.coremedia-systems.com.

by Jay Stack

3 Keys To Boosting App Acquisition with TV

Article by James Vainisi

Consumer experience has become a major factor in determining the health of your brand. And mobile apps provide a vehicle for both communication and commerce, allowing brands to deliver their experience to consumers in more ways, and more often. These new touchpoints are an efficient way to build brand relationships, which according to Salesforce, is more important than ever as over 70% of buying experiences are influenced by how consumers feel they’re being treated. Having an app installed on someone’s phone is invaluable for companies.

However, an app’s mere existence does not mean users will naturally gravitate towards it within the app store. To get the most out of an app investment, marketers must find a way to acquire users that are ready and willing to hit the download button. How can your brand get on as many devices as possible?

App-based businesses often place a heavy emphasis on digital marketing to drive installs, but over time most reach a point of diminishing returns and struggle to scale. The most effective acquisition campaigns are also leveraging TV, which has the power to bust through these performance ceilings to deliver increases in reach and response.

There are three key components to a successful TV-based app acquisition program:

1. Creative. Educate & Motivate.

With 4.4 million app competitors, winning the download battle through generic search terms can be a challenge. And research shows us that while only 24% of searches are branded, they drive 43% of the app store volume. It’s why you’re always going to fare better when users look for you by brand name, not category.

Strong response-focused creative can help motivate viewers to go directly to the app store and search for you – by name. The key is crafting content that engages the right audience, brings a clear understanding of your app’s benefits and makes a compelling case for acting now. Our approach, something we call Storyselling, looks at both structural and tactical ways to drive action.

Marketers are also testing new ways to push app installs. For instance, we’re seeing more brands experiment with QR codes on their commercials to streamline the download process. Maybe it’s the pandemic menus we’re all accustomed to, but QR codes are making resurgence across a variety of channels. Another thing to note is that creative production does not always have to be super expensive. Effective ads can be built from existing brand or video assets, stock video and smartly-designed animation or graphics.

2. Media. Test & Scale

TV campaigns are an efficient way to reach consumers that are ready to download an app, thanks in large part to the meteoric rise of simultaneous media consumption. By 2022 nearly 75% of TV viewers will be regular second-screen’ers and this represents an incredible opportunity for companies to reach mass audiences that are a tap away from the app store.

Applying the principles of Direct Response TV also represents a chance for marketers to get the most bang for their buck. The long tail of TV properties across linear, satellite, cable, diginets, and connected TV provides an abundance of inventory to reach targeted viewers. Even in a hot TV marketplace, experienced DRTV buyers can find efficient inventory that delivers response, if not rating points. Similar to digital channels, precisely targeted buying strategies can be optimized based on actions that are taken by viewers. By using a “test and scale” approach, brands can maximize investments on top-performing networks and dayparts.

3. Analytics. Measurement & Reporting

Given the test & scale approach taken by DRTV buyers, it is critical to have a strong attribution methodology. This starts with leveraging the best in data technology to connect viewer actions to the TV campaign. Make sure you have access to technology that will allow you to track app downloads and actions (like engagement and purchases), and attribute these back to each individual airing. On top of app acquisition and conversion, you will also need to measure TV’s impact on other KPI’s. Search activity, website visits and store traffic will help paint a complete picture of your campaign performance. If your buyers can quickly and easily analyze the data, this can lead to extensive optimization and testing opportunities.

At Eicoff, we develop interactive dashboards for every client to clearly track performance across KPIs and media components like station, daypart, and creative. The transparency and insight really make a difference with your ROI.

With the right pieces in place, TV can be a powerful acquisition tool to drive new customers to your app. If you’re interested in hearing more about testing opportunities or performance marketing strategies, feel free to connect with me at James.Vainisi@eicoff.com or reach out to our team at this link.

About CoreMedia Systems

CoreMedia Systems, Inc., develops and supports CoreDirect, the industry’s most widely used performance media management software. The system is used by more than 130 direct response agencies and marketers to plan, buy, manage, measure and optimize performance-based media campaigns. For more information visit www.coremedia-systems.com.

by Jay Stack

PremiumMedia360 and CoreMedia Partner - Automate Direct Response Ordering.

First-of-its-kind integration and partnership brings automation solutions to the unique operational complexities of direct response.

New York, NY, DATE.  CoreMedia Systems, the developer of CoreDirect, the advertising industry’s most widely used performance management software, and PremiumMedia360, the advertising data automation company, have formed a new partnership that enables direct response agencies to automate seller interactions across broadcast media. The partnership will create the first at-scale automation of its kind available from within media agency management software.

The partnership integrates CoreDirect with PremiumMedia360’s CLIR suite of products that automate data transmission and reconciliation. In the partnership’s first phase – now live – CoreDirect is integrated with PremiumMedia360’s CLIR Logs, enabling direct response buyers to automatically receive pre- and post-log files (critical records of  scheduled and actual ad airings) within the CoreDirect system.

The partnership serves to solve longstanding operational hurdles facing agencies that specialize in direct response—a procedurally complex field which is often “last-minute” by design, and involves frequent order revisions. Compounding these complexities are myriad manual processes that increase the chance of bottlenecks and lost information, and that also pose challenges to working across new format standards including TIP. Because PremiumMedia360 sits between agency systems and sellers to immediately “translate” data agnostically across formats, it is uniquely positioned to resolve these issues.

“CoreMedia is in the business of maximizing efficiency and data accessibility for direct response agencies,” said Kevin Gaffney, EVP, Product Strategy for CoreMedia. “This partnership aligns completely with that goal, and PremiumMedia360, a company straddling both buy and sell sides of the industry, is the perfect partner to help us push that vision forward.”

Added Cordie De Pascale, Chief Strategy Officer of PremiumMedia360: “As a former direct response buyer, I know firsthand the burdens and costs direct agencies face as they manually manage interactions across scores of media partners and buys. We are thrilled to work with CoreMedia to automate those interactions, unleashing enormous potential for direct agencies and their teams alike.”

About CoreMedia Systems

CoreMedia Systems, Inc., develops and supports CoreDirect, the industry’s most widely used performance media management software. The system is used by more than 130 direct response agencies and marketers to plan, buy, manage, measure and optimize performance-based media campaigns. For more information visit www.coremedia-systems.com.

About PremiumMedia360

PremiumMedia360 helps media agencies and sellers buy, sell, and partner more effectively—by letting them take control of the data that guides their interactions. Its reporting and collaboration tools dramatically  reduce the time and resources it takes to understand where campaigns stand—from order to invoice—and readies media companies to conduct business across new formats and standards such as TIP. The result: airings records stop being bottlenecks, and start being the source of business insight they should be. Learn more at www.PremiumMedia360.com.

by Kevin Gaffney

CoreMedia is Hiring! Preview our open positions and learn more.

Client Services Representative

Provide training and support for Direct Response advertising agencies and media buying services.

Essential Skills:

• Excellent communication skills (interpersonal, written, and public speaking)

• Exceptional attention to details

• Efficient problem solving skills

• Exceptional time management with the ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously

• Self-server who is highly motivated to take initiative

Responsibilities:

• Support of CoreMedia’s Direct Response media management software through daily phone and online communication with clients

• Create and implement test scripts for integration and regression testing

• Execute test plans and create test reports to describe program evaluation, testing and correction

• Document software defects and errors, using documentation reporting tools (Rally, Salesforce) to report defects to software developers and project managers

• Prepare user guides, training estimates, agenda, and outlines

• Conduct end-user onsite and remote software trainings

Requirements:

• Must be willing to travel

Send resume to : cscareers@coremedia-systems.com

by Jay Stack