Firstly, some recent stats that caught my eye. The IAB have released their latest annual figures on digital adspend with 2015 revenue of £8.6bn, up by 16.4% YOY. With digital spend always growing year on year as it takes an ever increasing slice of the marketing budget, this is not in itself surprising; what is of note however is the fact that this is the fastest such growth seen for 7 years. This has been driven in the main by mobile spend, which was responsible for 78% of this growth, with mobile now worth £2.6bn (up 60% YOY), accounting for 30% of all digital spend.
Even larger mobile growth was seen in the ecommerce sector, courtesy of the latest IMRG Capgemini eRetail Sales Index. Monthly figures for March recently released show overall online sales growing by 11%, within which smartphone transactions grew by a huge 101%. This meant that Q1 ecommerce sales increased by 15% YOY, nearly double the annual growth rate seen in Q1 2015. Larger mobile screen sizes coupled with much improved mobile shopping experiences from a variety of retailers are no doubt hoping to drive this upturn.
0 Comments
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”.
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… Firstly, a campaign to promote Savages’ new album “Adore Life” caught my eye at the start of this week, with some striking outdoor posters taken in locations such as Shepherds Bush, elsewhere in London and in the USA. As social media updates then amplified its reach much further, this is a great example of traditional media with a twist helping to drive online buzz. Admittedly, the fact that Savages are signed to pretty much my favourite record label Matador makes it more likely that I’ll personally see this, but in terms of some tight customer targeting there, job done! A fair bit of other music news caught my eye this week too, in particular Spotify’s announcement that they will soon be adding video, initially just on mobile apps. Looking back to older music formats, Wired took an interesting trip to a vinyl factory in Holland, this week’s take on the “record renaissance”. In the digital marketing world, a trend much discussed in recent weeks has been the fact that social media ad spend (driven mainly by mobile) has been growing at a much faster rate than search spend and this infographic from Kenshoo provides a really useful snapshot of the key stats in Q4 2015. The headline figure here is that social spend grew by 50% year on year, with search up by the much smaller 8%, driven mainly by PLAs (aka Google Shopping). This research chimes with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg urging brands to “catch up” in mobile, along with the news that 80% of Facebook’s ad revenue in December was mobile, up from 20% just 3 years ago. The Guardian took an intriguing look at why many modern movie posters are unsatisfying from both an artistic and marketing point of view. As Michael Barnett from Marketing Week states “You would think the most effective way to [maximise box-office revenues] is to create something memorable and striking, but most of the time, marketers will choose the low risk option”. This report outlines that the future may be brighter however, with the growth of digital poster sites offering fresh creative options “for a new level of visual inventiveness”. Finally and perhaps appropriate for a Friday, irreverent IT site The Register reported that pubs are “officially good for the soul”, showing that the constant need for the long standing physical social network of hanging out with friends remains as important as ever in this digital age (if we really needed to know this?!). As the research for this was commissioned by CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale), this is perhaps unsurprising but good to see nonetheless. Cheers... 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
All
Archives
December 2020
|