Moving onto the modern day, this week’s big ecommerce news was Amazon’s wholesale tie-up with Morrisons, enabling Amazon to expand on their Pantry offering with fresh and frozen produce, likely to be available to UK consumers within a few months. Looking back to Brent Cross, this continuing innovation makes one question what the shopping centre will look like in a further 40 years; Amazon itself is indeed already using Brent Cross as a pick-up point with one of its Lockers available there. As the viability of shopping centres and high streets themselves continues to need to encourage socialising and eating out opportunities more and more, above and beyond “traditional shopping”, some interesting innovation from McDonalds also caught my eye this week. Inspired by the continuing hype around Virtual Reality (which continued apace at last week’s World Mobile Congress) and Google’s cheap Cardboard option, McDonalds are today launching in Sweden an ingenious combination of VR with a Happy Meal box, named “Happy Goggles”.
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The big tech news for the coming week concerns the mobile industry, which is currently gearing up for its big annual beano, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from 22-25 February, so expect announcements and product launches from all the big players (excepting Apple who never exhibit), with the Samsung Galaxy S7 and LG G5 phones the objects of most interest. Some pretty big news in the world of search too, as Google have just confirmed that they will stop showing paid ads on the right hand side of desktop searches, albeit Google Shopping PLAs will still be visible on the right. Also, for “highly commercial” searches (e.g. “car insurance”), Google may show an additional fourth PPC search ad above the natural results, so it will be interesting to see if additional ads at the top will also spread onto mobile devices once this has bedded down. Closer to home, some recently announced figures show UK online sales growth picking up in January, with ONS estimating that online sales were up 10% year on year, a weekly average of £864m. Interestingly, January’s sales were 3% larger than December 2015, traditionally the largest month for online retail trade; this is likely to be driven by ecommerce sales pulled forward into late November fuelled by Black Friday discounting, further suggesting that this newly imported retail event is here to stay. Finally, in the week that Facebook announced they would be opening up their Instant Articles to all publishers, they certainly made a mis-step with one publication, namely the irreverent uniquely British institution that is Viz. Viz took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to announce that their Facebook page had been taken down due to not meeting community standards, before then proposing a new profile for the page. After much bemusement online, Facebook fortunately saw sense and reinstated Viz’s page the next day. This made a spoof article from a recent copy of Viz appear fairly prescient, as shown below… The big news of the coming week in the marketing world is probably the world’s largest advertising showcase, also known as the global sporting jamboree that is the Super Bowl. With the Super Bowl turning 50 this year, there is understandably huge excitement about the match itself in San Francisco on Sunday, with the dynamic Cam Newton’s Carolina Panthers favourites to beat veteran Peyton Manning’s Denver Broncos. However, whereas once the USA - and arguably the world - also eagerly awaited huge budget TV adverts airing during the game as added value entertainment, the digital world has fundamentally changed this, with many ads previewing online well before the gridiron itself, including some stern words from Helen Mirren. Accompanying social media campaigns around the core advert are a must to drive further impact, as shown by Pepsi having committed 40% of its Super Bowl media spend to digital. With 30 second TV ads typically costing $5m per slot (which could apparently buy you over 52,000 years of Netflix), the need to maximise this investment and gain maximum buzz is fairly evident. Of course, a huge impact TV ad is not even always needed to “win the Super Bowl” as Oreo did 3 years ago, thanks to its timely tweet responding to Super Bowl XLVII’s “blackout” when the stadium floodlights failed for half an hour causing the game to halt. Finally on the Super Bowl, a good example of the evolution of how we watch big sporting events is provided by this quick concept video from Microsoft, imagining how augmented reality could in future bring viewers even closer to the action. Closer to home, a couple of ecommerce stories leapt out this week. Firstly, Sainsbury’s much speculated purchase of Argos owner Home Retail Group finally become reality with a £1.3bn takeover, attracted by Argos’ multi-channel and logistics capabilities. Secondly, there was quite a lot of chat online about House of Fraser’s somewhat odd “#Emojinal” Valentine’s Day campaign; as Econsultancy asked: “massive fail or marketing genius”? Personally, it seems to me that superimposing emojis over topical figures like John Terry or Harry Styles doesn’t sit well with HoF’s strong established quality brand, but then this campaign probably wasn’t meant to resonate with me! That said, the dialling down on the supposed 2 weeks of activity for this campaign since - in HoF’s words – “that escalated quickly” on Monday suggest strong second thoughts from the brand themselves. Moving onto the tech world’s big beasts, the major news this week was that Google (or rather its new identity/parent company Alphabet) took over the mantle of world’s largest company earlier in the week on the back of some impressive Q4 earnings. This saw Alphabet’s market value sitting at $560bn, compared to previous number one Apple’s $540bn. An insightful Guardian article pointed out that since Google restructured to become Alphabet six months ago its market cap has risen by over $200 bn, while Apple’s has declined by a similar amount; which is attributed to Google’s more diverse and forward thinking products and services offering combined with iPhone growth starting to stall. Slightly less heralded was some Facebook news this week, as it overtook Exxon to become the fourth most valuable company, meaning that the four biggest businesses are now all tech stocks, with Microsoft completing the party in third. Facebook owned Whatsapp also announced this week that it has passed the milestone of a billion monthly users for the first time, as Facebook’s overall mobile dominance continues to grow when you consider the combined might of Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram, not to mention the 800m now using Facebook Messenger each month. Finally, big congratulations to BBC Radio 6 Music, which has become the most listened to digital radio station, with 2.2m listeners now tuning in each week on average. Once threatened with closure before a strong online led campaign helped it survive, 6 Music is a great example of how a sure understanding of your audience and a refusal to dumb down can help brands thrive; even in the music sector, a lesson that many struggling or defunct publications probably should have learnt from – in particular the decline of the once influential, entertaining and informative NME, now reduced to a freebie husk of what it once was. It’s been a week of landmarks in the digital and marketing world. Wikipedia turned 15 and amongst the news celebrating this, I particularly liked this round-up of the most edited pages each year. 2012 is a year that really shows the variety of Wikipedia (which boasts 5m English articles now, up from 500,000 in 2005), with the most edited page being “Syrian Civil War” followed by “Gangnam Style” at number two. LinkedIn announced that it has now reached 20m members in the UK, equating to 58% of the working population. LinkedIn added 2m new UK members during 2015 from what was already obviously a fairly significant base. It was interesting to reflect on this in a week when arguably the first social network to gain mainstream acceptance in the UK - Friends Reunited - finally shut for good. This prompted many to question “I thought that shut years ago?”, while I enjoyed this look at other once popular social networks and what happened to them. One final landmark too: The Drum celebrated 60 years of UK TV advertising with an entertaining mash-up showing 60 great adverts in under 90 seconds, well worth a quick view. And yes, Shake’n’Vac does make the cut. The start of the week brought further confirmation of the move away from the high street and towards online retailing, with the BRC announcing that high street footfall over Christmas was 4% down on last year; albeit there was better news for retail parks where footfall grew by 2%. In other ecommerce news, Aldi this week made its first foray into selling online with the launch of its wine store, the start of a £35m ecommerce investment with plans to sell electrical items, clothing and more later on this year. Marks & Spencer also launched a new online store this week, with the launch of an Australian website, its first offering of this type outside Europe as M&S continues its international expansion plans.
Finally, Twitter went down for many users on Tuesday (apparently due to “an internal code change”), which of course brought many completely rational reactions from users, some of which are summarised in this blog. A quick round-up of recent marketing news and ecommerce trading updates, plus the week’s largest story online: the death of David Bowie and the social media reaction to this, much heartfelt but some clumsily opportunistic.
A last shout for overall 2016 predictions too with Econsultancy founder Ashley Friedlein’s 10 digital marketing and ecommerce trends; lots of interesting insights and I was pleased to see that Ashley’s first prediction (about marketing tech architecture or “marchitecture”) was in line with my recent 2016 blog post, which also started with this point. It’s been a very busy week for post Christmas corporate trading updates. Obviously, these have shown various winners and losers, but one consistent trend has been the continuing rise of ecommerce (and in particular mobile) sales. Internet Retailing’s take on December’s BRC sales figures highlighted this well, while Marketing Week demonstrated how digital marketing was helping to driving overall brand engagement as well as direct sales, with Aldi’s John Lewis spoof singled out for praise. Finally, David Bowie’s sudden and unexpected death on Monday led to a wealth of reaction, with social media of course to the fore. Much of this was personal tributes explaining just what Bowie meant to the individuals in question but there was also some really terrible bandwagon jumping by various non-related brands keen to get in the action. Crocs’ terrible tweet was possibly the most publicised offender and certainly one of the worst, as Brand Republic pointed out, while the ever entertaining Condescending Corporate Brand Page on Facebook rounded up quite a few other awful examples. A time to reflect that even seemingly otherworldly figures have family and friends to consider and that trying to sell shoes on the back of this is at best tawdry, at worst completely insensitive; surely not what Bowie was envisaging in his guise as an early internet pioneer, among the many strings to his bow. |
Jim ClearLead blogger and founder of Clear Digital: talking about ecommerce, digital, marketing and media. Categories
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